


Between Periods

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hockey, Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 18:46:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19046233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: Shuuzou's father always said it was fine to take the scenic route.





	Between Periods

**Author's Note:**

> Character death, terminal illness, grief, anxiety, refs to a character being closeted
> 
> Title comes from [the poem by Jim Daniels](https://www.writerstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Daniels_1stPersonPoetry.pdf)
> 
> This comes first chronologically in the On One Knee universe, but it’s meant to stand alone as well. The only necessary context should be that Shuu plays hockey instead of basketball and he's a few years older than everyone else.

They spend the Fourth of July in the hospital. Shuuzou can hear the fireworks outside, his father in a half-sleep in the bed, his mother stress-knitting a sock. His siblings are off on a walk, nominally to the vending machine; it’s really to get a breather from all this. They’re all used to it, the kids most of all (how well do they remember a time before this, when their father was healthy and his sickness wasn’t the black hole their family orbited around?) but no matter how normal this is they’re never comfortable. When a quick hospital visit becomes an inpatient stay, and the stay becomes two weeks with their father getting worse each day, and worse than he’s been in years, pretending to escape is the only way any of them can catch their breath.

Shuuzou stares out the window into the dark parking lot. His eyes trace over the outlines of the few remaining cars until he sees theirs, the Passat wagon his mom had agreed to let him buy for her used, with coaxing from his father. The Buick sedan wasn’t big enough for all of them anymore, though they still use it. Shuuzou sits in the passenger seat when his sister practices driving it, tongue between her teeth as she flicks the turn signal and glances right and left, deliberate the way driving teachers always told Shuuzou, the way Shuuzou’s always told her. (That’s how you pass the test.)

“You want to go?” Shuuzou says. “When they get back.”

Shuuzou’s mother pauses, halfway through a stitch. She glances back at Shuuzou’s father, now clearly sleeping, his mouth open. 

“Plug in his phone for him.”

Shuuzou stands up and cracks his back, all of a sudden feeling a tightness in his ass and thighs and shoulders from sitting in a too-small cheap chair all day. He needs to work out tomorrow, go for an hour on the rowing machine and maybe some yoga. The charger cord has slipped behind the nightstand and Shuuzou has to reach and fumble for it, and his muscles protest. The phone lights up when he jams it in, and he notes the pileup of various app notifications. There are more now than there were this morning when he’d unplugged the phone and placed it in his father’s shaking hand and his father had turned the phone face-down and set it in his lap. Shuuzou says nothing to his mother; she’s already worried enough. 

She falls asleep on the car ride home, gaze fixed out the window, the side of her ear illuminated by light through the sunroof when they pass by a streetlamp. The radio is tuned to a traffic report in Spanish, but most of the people he sees outside are on foot. Whole families pass on the sidewalk, decked out in red, white, and blue; children hold melting popsicles, their hands stained neon turquoise, their faces pointed up waiting for the next round of fireworks to streak across the sky.

* * *

His father is a little more alert in the morning, but not so much in the afternoon when they take him to radiation. He has to be lifted from the bed to the stretcher, and Shuuzou can’t not look away. His father’s been knocked around by infections, chemo, radiation, pain meds; he’s always had more in him than this. Two days ago, he’d pushed away his evening medicine, and Shuuzou’s brother had sat on the edge of the bed and coaxed him into taking it. The last time they’d taken him for an MRI, only a few days ago, he’d tried to get up and walk to the stretcher; this time he barely moves, and it hurts to watch.

Shuuzou’s used to seeing everything as a bad sign by now; a cough is a growing infection and never just an irritated throat, a faraway stare something far worse than spacing out. He could try to stop his paranoia, but he’s been right too many times. The swollen ankle had been a blood clot, the shaking hands an adverse reaction to the drugs every time. The mobility troubles were the cancer spreading to his spine, and that wasn’t even in the range of what Shuuzou had suspected, even if it should have been obvious. Just as it should have been obvious when his father was being too chatty with waiters and struggling to count out money to send him to the convenience store for more milk that he’d been sick in the first place, all those years ago. 

“I’m taking a walk,” Shuuzou says, after the sound of the wheels on the hallway floor outside have faded. 

The TV on the wall is showing the news; two reporters with faces stiff from plastic surgery are reciting words that go by in subtitles too fast for Shuuzou to read. The light flashes on his mother’s face. The sock she’s knitting is nearly finished. She nods at him, and he takes off. 

Shuuzou knows the layout of the neuro wards here by heart. His father’s in a different room every time he’s here; he’s been in the regular unit and the stepdown and the ICU, before the renovation and after. Shuuzou’s gotten here bleary-eyed in the morning, headed to the wrong room, and only realized once he’d walked in on someone else, once or twice almost every hospital stay he’s been here for, but he can always find the way to the exit, around the corner and down the hallway from the waiting room. Waiting for the elevator, Shuuzou avoids the eyes of passing staff, shoving his hands into his pockets to check for his visitor’s pass, phone, wallet--not that he’s really going anywhere. He’ll be outside, for a bit, until the heat is too much, walk around the hospital grounds, maybe stop at a newsstand or a cafe and stand around on the inside of a normal building surrounded by normal people for a little. In the hospital he always feels like himself, but there’s a nervous sense of urgency, no matter what he’s there for--whether his dad is about to get out, in with a mystery infection or a relapse, or he’s taken a nasty fall on the ice and needs to get checked out. He feels not entirely part of the world, as if someone’s pushed him to the side and behind some sort of barrier, like the world could turn off outside and he’d never know until he stepped out himself.

The plaza outside the lobby is bright and sunny; the plants aren’t wilting out in the sun. Begrudging the hospital for a wasteful set up out front isn’t something Shuuzou has the energy for at the moment, but it does seem stupid every time he thinks about it. He squints into the sun, getting his bearings; he’d left his sunglasses in the car. It’s not worth it to go into the parking lot and get them. Shuuzou sighs. He wants to go away, just walk in any direction for a while, until he can’t see the hospital and the streets aren’t full of people in scrubs with badges.

He crosses the street, turns the corner, and heads up La Cienega toward somewhere, anywhere. He’s still panicking, but telling his body to relax doesn’t feel like a waste. The dry heat is slamming him full-blast; Shuuzou briefly pictures his sneakers melting to the pavement and sticking. There’s a coffee shop around here, maybe on Melrose, that even Shuuzou can’t get too lost and out of the way looking for.

It is on Melrose, right around the corner. After ordering an iced coffee and a salad, Shuuzou sits down. He’s not particularly hungry or thirsty, but he should eat while he can, and while he has a real table in front of him instead of having to rely on the thin armrest of the hospital chairs or, worse, his lap. The salad tastes like crispy paper, all of its flavor lost in his mouth. The coffee is bitter and smooth, a touch more flavorful than the food. The cafe is not at fault; Shuuzou’s brain is. Feeling bad about his own brain seems perverse when his father’s has betrayed him in worse ways, but there’s nothing else to blame for his racing heart and sweaty palms, the desire to run in circles, to ride the wrong way down the road on someone else’s motorcycle, pushing the machine to faster than it can go and scorching the fumes out of the gas tank. He needs to do something but he can’t do anything, the feeling of being benched for a period on a shorthanded team writ large.

Last year’s worlds seem like they were another era, with just as long left between now and the beginning of the next season, months of tension, his father’s treatment and rehab, cycling through the same things again. Shuuzou glances around, taking in the decor on the walls. It’s different than the last time he was here, which was--last year? This coffee is better than what he makes at home or buys at the Starbucks right across from the hospital, but he hasn’t had the time to spare, meetings with the doctors who take him more seriously than his mother, opinions that always change, as if they don’t know what to do, as if they’re throwing darts at the wall.

They’ve seemed this way before, when Shuuzou’s been feeling his bitterest, like extra-dark coffee. Mysterious, devastating infections that don’t show up on tests, treatments his father hasn’t seemed to respond to, and days of stagnation always put him on edge; they always figure it out, and eventually his father stabilizes and improves. Shuuzou’s drink sweats on his hand; he wipes it and looks back at the counter.

The barista, a guy around Shuuzou’s age in a Lakers hat, leans across the bar, talking to a woman holding a dog. The dog is wiggling in her arms, and she adjusts her grip. The barista gestures; he’s got nice forearms. Another reason to come back here when he can, then. Shuuzou averts his eyes when the barista turns his way, staring into the layer of half-melted ice at the top of his drink. He shouldn’t stay for too much longer, but maybe if he waits long enough his father will be back from radiation when he returns.

He waits, sipping at his iced coffee. People parked with their laptops for the long haul get up for seconds. The woman talking to the barista lets her dog down and they leave. A group of teenagers orders pastries and iced teas, and a jogger buys two bottles of water and chats with the barista while people line up behind him. Shuuzou chugs the rest of his drink and gets up. It’s time to face the sunshine and the hospital.

While he waits for the light at the corner, he pulls out his phone to check the time.

The LED indicator is flashing blue. Probably a teammate, or a push from some random app. Or his sister wants him to pick her up an iced coffee.

It’s a missed call, a voice message, and several texts from his brother.

_ Dad had a seizure on the way to radiation. _

_ We’re moving rooms. _

_ Are you OK? Come back now. _

Shuuzou pivots and begins to sprint towards the other end of the block. His visitor’s badge from this morning is still good, right? Where are they? How bad is it? Why are they moving rooms? Where are they going? He dials voicemail, chanting swears through the slow, robotic intonation that he has one new voice message and three saved messages, until finally, his brother’s voice comes on, only to say the same thing his last text message did. He ends the call and brings up text messaging again.

_ omw where are you _ , he types in.

No answer. The next crosswalk light turns red as Shuuzou reaches the end of the block, and a car blows through the intersection, followed by another. 

“Shit,” Shuuzou says under his breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

His brother still hasn’t replied--Shuuzou texts his sister, then his mother, the same thing.

He’s at the hospital doors when his mother replies. 

_ ICU _

The guard waves Shuuzou through, and he heads for the elevator, slowing his pace. He checks his phone again, no updates. Maybe good, maybe bad. He tries not to think about anything, but that never works.

He sees them as soon as he gets through the ICU doors, his mother with one arm around each of his siblings, all of them crying. Fuck.

“Is he…?”

Shuuzou’s brother points to the room opposite them. Shuuzou cranes his neck; he can’t see past the tangle of moving doctors and nurses, calling out words Shuuzou doesn’t recognize and passing things back and forth, twisting the caps off saline syringes, hooking up what looks like at least a dozen IVs, over the din of beeping and chiming machines. Holy shit.

Shuuzou’s brother grabs his hand and squeezes, hard. It’s nothing he’s doing that makes Shuuzou’s entire body feel as if it’s trapped in one of those kitchen appliances that turns dough into spaghetti, squeezed and flattened and sliced all at once. His father was not doing well, but he had been close to improving, physical therapy and radiation and going home, breathing and thinking and following conversation if spacing out easily and not speaking. All of that careful not-progress, downhill to a flat line, has cratered. Could he die any second? Will Shuuzou ever be able to look into his eyes again?

The number of staff in his father’s room begins to thin out; the machines are still beeping and all the IVs are still going--Shuuzou can see him now, and he’s never seen so many tubes sticking out of him. Even with all the lines getting somehow hooked together, they’re going into his father at so many different points, and—

One of the two remaining staffers steps out, pulling off her rubber gloves as she does. “Mr. Nijimura’s family?”

Shuuzou nods.

“I’m Dr. Kang, the on-call physician tonight. We should talk, but you can go in and see him first.”

Shuuzou’s mother and brother head in first, while Shuuzou waits outside with his sister. They’re down to the bottom of the tissue box, and she’s sniffling. Shuuzou reaches into his pocket; there’s a crumpled napkin that he’d grabbed back in the cafe. He holds it out, and his sister takes it without hesitation and loudly blows her nose into it. 

Shuuzou’s father is lying on the bed, most of his face covered by a mask that’s hooked up to a respirator, glassy eyes unblinking and staring straight ahead, even more out of it than he’d looked earlier in the day, like a bronze statue in a museum. Up close, the tubes going into his shoulder and hand and the base of his neck don’t look any better--up close he can see the blood and the hasty bandaging, the hospital gown his father has always resisted wearing. Shuuzou reaches for his father’s hand, careful not to dislodge the carefully-taped pulse meter on his finger. 

“Hi, Dad.”

He doesn’t respond at all, but his hand is warm. Shuuzou’s sister is on the other side, staring into his face.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and sniffs again. “Hang in there.”

She swallows and wipes her eyes on her sleeve; Shuuzou squeezes his father’s hand again. “We’re here for you, Dad. We’ll be right back.”

Dr. Kang leads them down the hall, followed by a younger man in a lab coat whom she introduces as her fellow. They reach an unmarked door near the exit, which opens onto a windowless room with a round table and chairs, some old electronics collecting dust in the back. As they sit down, a snarl of questions rise to the front of Shuuzou’s mouth, what happened and what’s the prognosis and can he hear us and how long.

“There was an incident when Mr. Nijimura went down to radiation. It could have been a seizure or he could have passed out, but we believe that he vomited and aspirated, and it got into his lungs, causing a pneumonia.”

Isn’t pneumonia some sort of viral infection?

“We intubated him, but he’s in septic shock right now. He’s running a high-grade fever; his heart rate is high and his blood pressure is dangerously low. We have him on three different medicines to help that currently, which is the maximum we can do given his condition. Tonight will be critical. Does Mr. Nijimura have a living will?”

Shuuzou looks at his mother. The doctors had asked her that once before, when he’d been fighting off an infection when Shuuzou wasl in high school. The answer then had been no, and Shuuzou had argued with his father about it, the worst they’d fought since Shuuzou was in middle school, and his father had refused to budge--he’d claimed what he wanted would change; he had time; they would tell him when he only had a few months left.

“No,” says Shuuzou’s mother.

“Are you his medical proxy?”

Shuuzou’s mother nods.

“You’ll need to think about the plan going forward. Assuming he stabilizes, we’ll want to get him off the tube--that is, extubate--in a few days. There are a number of possibilities, and I think right now it’s best to focus on tonight, but at some point you may need to make some decisions. We can do everything possible to keep him alive, which could mean tracheostomy or dialysis, or at a certain point we can do everything possible to keep him comfortable, and those decisions are very time-sensitive. Of course, your answer might change as circumstances change, and we’ll respect that as well.”

“What would be the quality of his life, assuming things go well?” says Shuuzou’s mother.

“I don’t know,” says Dr. Kang. “Extubation does depend on a certain level of brain function, and right now he’s not stable enough to do a brain scan. Frankly, there’s a chance he might not have that capability, but if he does, it depends on a lot of other things. I really can’t give you an answer; I’m sorry.”

“So you’re saying he could be brain dead,” says Shuuzou.

“He’s still demonstrating reflexes,” says the fellow. 

So the next-worst thing, basically.

“Can we stay with him tonight?” says Shuuzou’s mother.

“Only one of you can go in at a time,” says Dr. Kang. “You can stay in the waiting room down the hall when you’re not with him. If you need a few minutes, you can have this room until someone else needs it. Do you have any other questions?”

Shuuzou looks at his mother, and then his brother and sister. His brother is biting his nails; his sister is glancing around the room. 

“Not at the moment,” says Shuuzou’s mother. 

“Another doctor will be on the overnight, but my fellow will be here if you need any questions.”

“Thank you,” says Shuuzou’s mother.

The doctors exit; the door clicks shut behind them louder than a shout echoing in an empty canyon.

* * *

Shuuzou’s turn to go in and see his father comes last. He tries to doze off in the waiting room chair as the sky outside turns dark, but he’s too wired. Something could happen at any minute. The last time he was here was after his father went under for surgery, and they’d been told downstairs that everything went as expected. Waiting then had been hard enough; staring at the wall or at the television or into the phone in his hand while scrolling through another blog post had felt excruciating. Shuuzou can’t bring himself to even try to do that now.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to think about street hockey, asphalt under the wheels of his rollerblades, sweat sticking his shorts to his thighs, the names and faces of the people he’d played with as a teenager, the gross locker room at the old roller rink they’d used. He can’t help thinking about his father instead, lying on the bed staring upright. He can’t be brain-dead if he’d squeezed his hand; that’s more than a reflex, right? 

False hope is useless, but feeling this anxious when there’s nothing you can do is fucking pointless. Shuuzou opens his eyes. 

His mother is asleep, and his sister is playing a game on her phone. She looks engrossed, and Shuuzou’s not going to bother her when she’s found a distraction. He closes his eyes again. 

When he finally gets in, things are as they were a few hours before. The sun has set and the world outside the window is dark, but his father is still lying on the bed and attached to so many tubes and apparatuses. The numbers are still the same, still bad. 

Shuuzou reaches for his father’s hand again, but this time his father doesn’t squeeze back.

“Hi, Dad.”

He can’t come up with something to say. What hasn’t he said to his father that he needs to? If he were the one in the bed, what would he want his father to say to him?

“Remember that Kiyoshi kid you used to play dominoes with? I wonder what happened to him.”

The year Shuuzou went pro, his father had met a Japanese teenager in PT. He had been rehabbing some kind of basketball injury, and he’d struck up a friendship with Shuuzou’s father. The two of them both liked dominoes and complaining about the weather, and though Kiyoshi had been joking, there was an awful lot of truth in what he said about being an old man in a teenager’s body. He knew a kid who went to Shuuzou’s middle school, though he had attended after Shuuzou (but was probably another darling of the exceedingly well-funded basketball program), and another kid who used to live in LA who had recommended some Japanese restaurants to Kiyoshi that Kiyoshi had in turn recommended to Shuuzou.

Kiyoshi had returned to Tokyo that February to try and graduate high school with his class, and though he’d sent Shuuzou a few messages on WhatsApp, they’d lost touch.

No point in messaging him now only to say his father’s dying in the hospital. Kiyoshi’s probably busy playing dominoes with his actual friends right now, whatever time it is in Japan.

“I’m sorry we used to fight so much. I’m sorry if I made you sick, and I’m sorry I caused you stress. You and Mom didn’t deserve that. And I’m sorry it took me so long to straighten out and find what I wanted. I know you say taking the scenic route is good, but I--it’s not like sometimes it’s not better to be direct.”

Fuck, this doesn’t make much sense even to him, and it probably wouldn’t make sense to his father if he were awake and alert.

“But I wish I’d fought more with you about making a living will. I’m sorry I didn’t push back; I’m sorry I still felt guilty about stressing you out and just left it. I mean, you’re going to get better so you can make one, and so we can argue, right?”

Shuuzou squeezes his father’s hand again. This time, his father squeezes back. He didn’t want to die here in the hospital; living will or no he’s made that clear since before he was even sick. After his own mother died, when Shuuzou was five or six, he remembers his father’s bitterness at the hospital setting, how he’d told Shuuzou’s mother that he never wanted that and Shuuzou’s mother had told him not to say such things in front of a child, though at the time Shuuzou hadn’t really understood.

“And we’ll drink some whiskey together, too. After you’re off some of your meds.”

One of the IV machines begins to beep; it’s finished its drip. The nurse comes back in, and Shuuzou moves out of the way so he can fix it. He presses a few buttons on the machine, unhooks the empty bag of saline, and grabs a full one that’s hanging from another pole. He manages to hook it back up much more efficiently than Shuuzou ever did when administering IV medicine to his father at home, but that’s why he’s the full-time nurse and Shuuzou isn’t. 

“Love you Dad,” Shuuzou says, after the nurse leaves again. “We’re all pulling for you to get better soon.”

* * *

His father's stable in the morning, but not much changes after that in the ensuing few days. Shuuzou quickly becomes used to the ICU; the beeping IV machines, the breathing apparatus, and even the loud groans of the patient next door are all both background noise and enough to make him clench his jaw tight and dig his fingers into the armrest of the chair.

He drives the kids home when visiting hours are over (the hospital will bend the rules enough to let minors into the ICU but won’t let them stay overnight and they aren’t taking any chances). His mother takes a cab home a little bit later, and Shuuzou’s always the one who drives them back to the hospital in the morning. 

The closed-off world of the hospital has become the even more sequestered world of the ICU, the five of them, and the various members of the hospital staff coming in to read off numbers that have a seemingly arbitrary meaning, fix the machines, and change out the medicines. His father’s body is functioning better. His blood pressure is higher, his heart rate lower, and his temperature almost back to normal; his organs are mostly fine and though his lungs need to be drained a few times a day they’re not getting worse. He follows light with his eyes, squeezes hands, moves his arms into uncooperative positions, though he doesn’t even try to talk. 

His father’s neurooncologist, Dr. Nagy, has come by a few times to talk to Shuuzou’s mother about the abstract plan for if and when his father gets off the ventilator, and that makes Shuuzou feel a little better. The doctors and nurses in the unit can give and take hope like a magician making coins disappear and reappear, but Dr. Nagy wouldn’t waste his time on a case and a person with no hope when he has other patients to attend to and things to do.

Most of the time, they’re alone in the room, though, Shuuzou’s mother sighing and looking at the numbers, his brother pacing, his sister scratching her arms or pretending to read a book. Shuuzou scrolls through his phone, refreshing the same websites and apps until the battery dies. His teammates, at least, are having good summers and posting well-filtered pictures on Instagram. Diaz, one of the alternate captains, has been hosting a charity tournament featuring local kids in Minneapolis; he’s also got new teeth and has posted quite a few cheesy fake glamour-shot selfies. Walker and his wife are on vacation in Hawaii, as witnessed by all the gorgeous photographs of volcanoes and long views. He’s the only person on the team who Shuuzou’s told about his father being sick at all, and he’s not going to disrupt Walker’s vacation just to validate his own existence beyond the hospital building. He likes a few pictures, comments  _ nice bro _ on a particularly majestic mountain peak, and moves on. He doesn’t want to engage much more than that on social media right now, anyway; he likes one of Enbar’s selfies with his dogs and a few of his teammates’ comments chirping him and then puts his phone away again. They’ve only got two chargers between them, and his brother’s in perpetual need. Shuuzou can afford to get another one in the hospital gift shop, but then they’d all be staring into screens until they blind themselves. 

The fourth day passes, and the doctors still don’t think his father’s ready to get the tube out. Shuuzou is trying not to be agitated, but it’s more difficult as the weight of the time they’re losing presses down on top of him, as if the air in the room is growing heavier. The fifth day is Shuuzou’s twenty-fourth birthday, and not much of one. Replying to social media wishes is more of a chore than anything, and the doctors are more tight-lipped.  _ Maybe tomorrow _ means something different than it did a few days before.

Shuuzou’s sister goes out to pick up lunch, rather than ordering delivery for once. She comes back with the promised tacos and chocolate cupcakes from Magnolia, Shuuzou’s favorite. They don’t make up for the situation, but it’s fun to stick unlit candles into them and it’s nice to have dessert every once in a while.

“We can have a real celebration when we’re all home,” his brother says, and Shuuzou wishes he shared his willful optimism.

His mother takes the kids home when visiting hours end, leaving Shuuzou alone with his father and the machines. He’s as steady as he’s been, vitals the same and breaths hard against the ventilator. Things are okay, for now, but they might go from okay to shit, to no hope at all, as soon as the next hour. The sun is setting, its glare against the windows across the street more muted. The days and hours they’ve spent here are twisting up inside each other, the way time does at the end of a triple-OT playoff games, when his legs are numb from skating and nothing seems real anymore.

* * *

Dr. Kang is back the next morning. She’s in the room looking at the IVs when they arrive.

“I think today might be our best shot at extubation,” she says.

It’s not that optimistic, is it? Or is Shuuzou seeing the worst in a situation that could go either way?

His mother nods. “Then we should do it.”

Dr. Kang goes over the risks again, the plans if this all goes south, what that looks like. They’re going to sedate him to bring him off, so that means less responsiveness, but they’ll try to take him into a CAT scan as soon as they can to ensure there’s no bleeding in his brain. His father will still be on a ventilator, but it will be doing less of the work and he will have to show that he can do most of it without tiring out before they take it off him. The first five hours are the most critical, she says, and after that the first few days. They’ve been taking this one obstacle at a time; this will be no different but they’ll need luck in their corner.

They sit in the waiting room during the extubation, back here again with the same set of families they’ve passed in the hall all week. Shuuzou unties and reties his shoelaces the way he does his skates before every important game, the way he did right before he got the news that his father’s cancer was in remission the first time. It doesn’t always work, but he’s been saving this up for when he needs the luck.

When the nurse comes to get them, there are no apologies or condolences on her lips, and Shuuzou exhales slowly. They’ve made it past one hurdle; they have five hours for the next one. The mask on his face is different and a new IV is dripping a low-dose opiate into his blood, but otherwise his father looks the same as he had before. His breathing is still labored, and Dr. Kang’s words about tiring out cross Shuuzou’s mind again, in a more foreboding tone than he’d heard the first time.

He joins his brother in pacing around the room, down the hallway and to the vending machine. He stands in front of it for five minutes trying to decide between raisins and gummy worms before ceding his position to a waiting technician and leaving empty-handed. It doesn’t matter; he needs to make the time pass faster and reach the mark. 

It’s a general benchmark, not the defining factor, but it’s something to point to and wait for They don’t have much more to go on than that right now.

Almost immediately after the five hour mark, a nurse comes in to take him to the CAT scan. She wheels off the bed, leaving the room empty, and Shuuzou suddenly feels hungry. He should have bought the gummy bears and the raisins back at the vending machine. 

“Can we order dinner?” says his sister.

Shuuzou smiles. “Just what I was thinking.”

The tension’s broken a little, or it’s at least wobbly. Shuuzou pulls out his phone to look through his email for old restaurant receipts. They’d gotten Chinese a couple of days ago that had tasted good and arrived before the estimated time.

It arrives quickly again today, and when Shuuzou gets upstairs with the bags of food in his hand, his father’s back. He doesn’t look very comfortable, and Shuuzou’s mother is talking with the nurse about upping his pain medication.

“No bleeding?” says Shuuzou.

His brother shakes his head, but the news doesn’t seem as good as it should. What’s wrong now? Is he too tired to breathe on his own? The nurse doesn’t seem particularly concerned, but Shuuzou’s mother does. Shuuzou doesn’t feel very hungry anymore. He places the bags on the floor and goes to his father’s side.

He’s no worse when they leave that night, but not much better. Shuuzou falls asleep clutching his phone, waiting for the worst call to come.

* * *

When they return in the morning, Shuuzou’s father is seemingly as they’d left him, same numbers, similar position, still sedated. When the doctors come in on their rounds, their faces are grim. 

“We can’t keep the carbon levels in his blood down. I’m sorry.”

Everything after that is static in Shuuzou’s ears. It’s like being slammed against the boards by three hundred pounds of muscle and skates and pads, chest-first, landing on the ice and trying to struggle to his feet because he doesn’t know if the play’s been whistled dead but of course it has when he’s crumpled on the ice like this, except he doesn’t realize that until later. One of the doctors says something about hours to days, and Shuuzou wants to puke. He nods along, dim, as the doctors continue, and finally they leave.

Shuuzou sinks into a chair. He should be up at the bed, talking to his father while he can; his siblings are. 

“Shuuzou?” his mother says.

“I need a minute,” Shuuzou says.

He clamors to his feet, walks out of the room, down the hall, past the waiting room, to the wooden bench by the elevator, where he sits down, putting his head between his legs. Fuck. No superstition and luck will save his father; no amount of attention and car and pleading will bring him back. They’d taken their best shot and missed. 

Someone sits down beside him; Shuuzou looks up. It’s his brother. 

“Hey,” says Shuuzou.

His brother looks like he’s going to cry, and when Shuuzou puts his arm around his shoulders, he does.

“I’m sorry,” his brother says. “I came here to check on you and I’m the one crying.”

“It’s okay,” says Shuuzou. “You don’t have to keep it together if you don’t feel like it.”

His brother sobs, pressing his face into Shuuzou’s shoulder, his wet eyes soaking through Shuuzou’s t-shirt within seconds. 

“It’s not fair,” his brother says. “You guys got so much more time with him, and I can’t even remember what he was like before he was sick.”

Shuuzou hugs his brother, awkwardly but the best he can given the position. “You’re right, it’s not fucking fair. It’s not fair to him, or us, or Mom.”

Saying that doesn’t make either of them feel any better. 

The hospital chaplain stops by the room after lunch; she’s made her rounds before and has been a calm presence despite Shuuzou’s general apathy toward religion. Her words are kind, in a different way from the better nurses. He’s not sure if his father would want a prayer right now, a ritual--though, isn’t there a saying about being Buddhist when you die? The mood is wrong for asking what it is, so Shuuzou says nothing.

There’s no one really to tell, to prepare. The only relatives they have are distant and haven’t been heard from since they left Japan. His father’s lost touch with most of his friends back there, if not all of them by here. The friends he’s had here had been transient, fellow patients in the neurooncology office; he’s outlived all of them. The last few years, his world has been the family and his doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. 

All things considered, his father had had a good run of it. No one had expected him to live this long. He had endured rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. He’d fought through infections. He’d been poked and prodded routinely in the name of research and trial treatments and he’d rarely complained. Shuuzou wants to be angry at the disease for doing this to his father, for putting him through all of it, but he can’t be angry at anyone. He only feels tired, and sad; he can only think about all the things he already misses. How his father had taken him out for ice cream on summer afternoons when he was young and had clung to his hand, how easy coming out to his father had been, how his father was never angry with him for going to college so far away or made a fuss over his not finishing.

Shuuzou’s mother insists on staying overnight, and she promises to call them if anything happens. This is probably the last time they’ll ever leave the hospital this late at night, after visiting hours have ended and they’ve been kicked out by the nurses and people are supposed to be sleeping, when aside from the rotating nurses and the bright lights it seems vacant, more striking and apocalyptic than usual. (Well, they might get one more encore, but at that point this will have sunk in, if only a centimeter more.) They’ve all complained about the weirdness of the atmosphere because it’s easier to do that and pretend their lives are mundane and normal, that solving that would solve everything, than to be openly upset because their father’s being poked with needles, his condition uncertain. Or certain, and bad, right now. They could really use a miracle but they’ve had so many already, gone stroke of luck to stroke of luck for ten years. Most people don’t last two years with this disease, but Shuuzou’s father’s had a string of coin flips landing on heads, and it had to end sometime.  ( But wasn’t all of this shitty luck in the first place? Is there any sufficient number of miracles to make up for that? )

Shuuzou has known how to drive this route since he barely had a license, driving his father to appointments or to the ER in the middle of the night when his mother had shaken him awake to tell him his father had a fever again. He’s got enough gas left to make tonight’s trip; one time he nearly hadn’t but hadn’t even thought about it because his father was coming home the next day and he’d let his sister settle on a radio station playing her current favorite drippy white dude with an acoustic guitar because things were on the upswing and they’d bought enough time that it had felt like forever. 

That time had always been borrowed and stolen and wrestled away, and even if they get a few more days, a few more months--what of it? What kind of life is going back to rehab, the same physical therapy his father’s had multiple times already, to recuperate in a hospital bed parked in the living room and get well enough to walk around only to end up in the hospital again? Would that kind of life be worth it if he could die at home, the way they’d planned out so long ago and ended up throwing away?

It’s a question Shuuzou can’t answer. It’s not even his to answer, but he hopes for an outcome anyway, knuckles white on the steering wheel. His eyes begin to fill up with tears again; he takes a deep breath. He can’t do this, not now; he pulls over to the side of the road and cuts the ignition. He can’t answer the question; he can’t save his father or giving him something better than he’d have to endure or that he’s already had to; he can’t even fucking get the kids home. He knew this was coming; he’s known it already, considered it so many times even since his father landed in the hospital this time. But even when you know a train is coming and your feet are stuck in the tracks, when you’ve been anticipating it for ten years you can’t brace for the impact.

His sister starts. “We there?”

She’s still half-asleep in the passenger seat, but then she sits up.

“Is it--do we need to go back?”

Shit. “No. Sorry, I just...can you drive?”

The words fall from Shuuzou’s mouth before he can stop them or even think about how unfair it is to ask this of his sister when she doesn’t even have her license, when they could be pulled over (unlikely on these quiet residential streets, but a possibility). 

She still hasn’t answered.

“Sorry,” says Shuuzou. “It wasn’t right of me to ask that.”

“I can do it,” she says.

“I appreciate it,” says Shuuzou. “We’re not far, though.”

He turns the key in the ignition; the car hums to life again. His sister fusses with her keys as he drives on through the empty streets, and in the back his brother snores, lying down across the seats instead of his usual slouch. At least he's too tired to let the dread keep him up all night.

* * *

They’re all wide awake on the way back in the morning, the time of day Shuuzou would walk if he was going to the hospital alone and his mother had already taken the kids in the car--it would him time to hear his thoughts in the real world, to wake up and space out and not have to be in the present moment the way he does when he’s driving. But it’s as if now they’re forced into the present, that the past and the future are walls closing in on them and leaving them in the moment, for better or for worse.

It feels like hunting dogs are racing in at Shuuzou’s heels, spurring him forward, like the period’s ending and he’s got one clear shot to make it count and not get walled off. He’s too wired to make coffee but too close to sleep to trust himself in the car without caffeine, so he takes a can of his brother’s Monster from the back of the fridge without asking. He’ll buy him a new one later, but now he’s got to will the Lemon Pledge smell out of his nostrils and force it down his throat, more of a wake-up slap than the caffeine will be when it kicks in.

No new texts, and Shuuzou will consider that a good thing. 

The morning sunlight is harsh through the car windows, up too far in the sky. It feels as if they’re already late, as if every red light or slow intersection is shedding more time they could have had. He tries to focus, breathe, remind himself that even if it is his fault, or even if he just thinks it is, assigning the blame right now won’t do a damn thing.

The route is quiet, quick, mercifully so, in a dreamlike way. If none of this were real, if the sweating energy drink in the cupholder is a figment of Shuuzou’s imagination and so are the lights going their way, and so are his brother’s fingernails tapping a rhythm on the console, then where did the dream start? If Shuuzou speaks, will that break it apart? Will he wake up in a hospital room?

He turns on the radio, the commercial jingle for a local plastic surgeon filling his ears. He knows it by heart at this point; if nothing else it’s catchy. Another commercial comes after that, and then the station ID; they’re almost at the hospital.

“Only July thirteenth, but it’s another hot Saturday morning for you,” says the host. 

Shuuzou exhales. It’s Saturday; that explains the empty streets and the empty hospital parking lot ahead. He’d known it really wasn’t a dream, but he’d clung to the shred of hope like water in his cupped hands, draining no matter how hard he’d pushed them together. It’s time to let it go, shake the droplets of water that remain off his hands.

The three of them all stand in separate corners of the elevator, all checking their phones or pretending to until they reach their floor, and they walk to the room in silence. Their mother is dozing off, chair placed next to their father’s bed, her hand in his. All of his vitals look the same as they did last night, not good but no worse; the only sounds are the ventilator and the IV drip. Shuuzou clears his throat.

“Hi, Mom. Dad.”

His mother starts forward and then lifts her head. Her eyes are red, the bags under them larger even than they’ve been the past few weeks. Her hair falls nearly to her shoulders, long overdue for a trim, and her face looks worn and exhausted.

“How are things?”

“The same.”

She yawns, and then Shuuzou’s brother does, too, and that gets his sister to crack a smile. It’s not really funny, wouldn’t be funny if this were a normal day, if they still had a shot at going home, but Shuuzou smiles, too. It’s fucking stupid, how tired they are. 

They take their places around the bed like they could do it in their sleep, Shuuzou’s brother next to their mother, Shuuzou’s sister at the head of the bed on the other side and Shuuzou next to her. He reaches under the blanket to find his father’s hand.

It’s warm, though Shuuzou has to move aside the fingers and slot his hand inside. He had stood in the same place nearly a week ago, when things had seemed so much better and so much worse at once. The room was noisy with IVs and the steps of the nurse coming in and out, cleaning and adjusting, the ventilator doing all of his father’s breathing for him. His father had squeezed his hand back then; he had allowed himself to think that if his father were to make it through tonight, he’d grab the next day, the next week, back from time. 

His blood pressure drops slightly on the monitor, and Shuuzou looks away from it.

“We’re here,” he says. “It’s okay, Dad.”

The words are empty, hollow in the room, popped like balloons with the sunlight piercing through the window blinds. His sister is crying again; his brother wordlessly hands her a paper towel (all of their faces are dry from shitty paper products and sleeves constantly dragged across them, they’ve been running out of hospital tissues so often). Shuuzou’s mother strokes his father’s arm. 

“Thank you for fighting so hard. You’ve done so well. It’s okay to rest now.”

Shuuzou shudders, closing his eyes at another onslaught of tears. His father has fought so hard; he’s fought the whole damn way, and for it to end like this, in a cold hospital room in summer, not even a day removed from the hope that he’d get well enough to get out of here and back home--it’s not fucking fair. Nothing is fair; this disease ought to have taught him that much, but Shuuzou will keep on protesting until he can’t anymore.

His father looks comfortable, peaceful, as if taking a nap. The best he’s looked in a while. Shuuzou squeezes his hand, and hopes he feels it.

* * *

The house is as quiet when they return as it was when they’d left in the morning, but it feels quieter now. The silence is just more noticeable, though, covering everything like a weighted blanket. Shuuzou’s mother’s plants have died, withered in the window boxes, forgotten in her absence. A couple of the succulents are okay, but the rest need to be dumped in the garbage before the flies get them. The living room is dusty, because no one’s been sitting in it, though Shuuzou’s father’s things are left as they were, as if he’d be coming back to them, and it hurts to look at.

His brother sits at the kitchen table, plowing through almost a week’s worth of leftover takeout they’d brought back from the hospital, whatever’s still edible. Shuuzou steals some of the leftover tortellini for himself and shoves it in the microwave while his brother crams stale-looking pita bread dipped in raita and bruschetta into his mouth. 

Even old and microwaved, the pasta’s good; now that Shuuzou’s not trying to get full as quickly as possible so he can let his mother sit back down in the least-uncomfortable of the two chairs he has time to actually taste it. It almost feels strange to sit and eat at a table and not with food perched on his lap. He dumps the other half of the pasta from the container onto his plate and microwaves that. 

Shuuzou’s father has not been here in the house for three weeks, and Shuuzou’s been back nearly every day, but not with time uncompressed, no tension of the tightrope between himself and the end of today or the beginning of tomorrow. There is enough time to sit, brush his thumb over the rim of his water glass, and avoid doing the dishes because someone else who isn’t overstretched will eventually do them, or he’ll have time later. There is enough time to think that he should be pouring his father more coffee, that he should hear his father grunting and shifting in the chair in the living room, the sounds of the television on another weather report or golf game or  _ Doctor Who _ rerun. 

Shuuzou and his father had settled in a routine before this hospital stay, the way they had every summer, the kind they could drop and pick back up even with the hospital interrupting them. Shuuzou’s mother would be out volunteering or running errands; the kids would be at school or hanging out with friends; Shuuzou and his father would play board games and drink coffee and watch TV and Shuuzou would coax his father into eating something healthier than usual. This time, too, Shuuzou had expected to eventually get it back, and he would trade all possibilities of it for another few weeks of his father at home, living and dying on his own terms, not the cancer’s crooked, crossed-out deal. What does it matter, though, when Shuuzou’s only trading one hypothetical for another?

He hasn’t slept well since before his father went into the hospital, but lying facedown on the bed doesn’t make sleep come easy. His mind is still racing, replaying the sound of the machines, his father’s face, his open mouth, the bruised skin on the back of his hand from the perpetual IV needle, the smell of the funeral home they’d gone to, the thought that he’ll never see his father again. He’ll never hold his hand; they’ll never drive anywhere again; they’ll never argue; they’ll never talk. He’ll never be able to text his father about a new opera recording; his father will never text him about meeting a hockey fan. He’d known this was coming for ten years, but even this morning there had been the slightest chance--even now, it feels like he shouldn’t rule out his father miraculously leaping up to life in the morgue. It’s a fucking ridiculous thought, but it punctures his defenses when his mind’s too slow on the backcheck to get it before it scores.

* * *

His father’s ashes fit in a small, heavy box that looks smaller sitting in a tote bag on the passenger seat of the Buick. Passing SUVs and compact sedans on the highway, Shuuzou remembers his father saying how cars used to be cars, and now they’re all the same. He used to have a black 86; Shuuzou knows the story well. The words recite themselves in his memory, under his tongue;  _ When I was nineteen I’d saved up a bit of money, and in those days it went a little further. _

The story finishes in his head as he rolls into the driveway. He shifts the car into park in silence and cuts the engine, then looks to the passenger seat. There’s no sense that his father is there, but it’s not something he expects. It’s not something he can hope for the way he had when he’d stood by his father’s bedside and squeezed his hand and waited, pleading with some unknown entity in his head, for his father to squeeze back. 

On the front steps, there’s a package marked PERISHABLE, probably another cake from one of Shuuzou’s mother’s friends from volunteering. He picks it up with his free arm, shoving the front door open with his knee, and carries it into the kitchen, placing it on the table. 

“I’m home!” he calls, but no one answers--everyone must still be out. 

Shuuzou carefully takes the box of his father’s ashes out of the bag. His mother had said they’d go back to Tokyo next summer to scatter them, and Shuuzou can’t disagree with that decision. Waiting might drag things out, but going now would feel like slamming the door too soon, achieving some false closure while they’re still paying medical bills and finishing the dregs of his father’s favorite cereal from the back of the cabinet. So for now, his father’s ashes will stay in the family altar.

The perishable package won’t fit in the refrigerator unopened, and it’s addressed to Shuuzou, so there’s no harm in opening it (though it seems odd that it’s addressed to him and not his mother). His phone vibrates, a text from Walker-- _ I sent you something. Website said it was delivered. _

Shuuzou swallows, his thumb hovering over his phone screen. He’d texted Walker about his father, and Walker had immediately asked if he should drive down from Berkeley or if they needed anything at all, and if they ever did to call him. They’re not best friends, and Shuuzou wouldn’t even call them very close, so the fact that Walker would sincerely offer and be prepared to do that, that he’d send a gift (even if it’s another coffee cake) is quite touching.

Shuuzou cuts the tape on the box with his mail key, a straight line down the middle, and pulls open the flaps. At the top, there’s a note.

_ Niji: Thought you could use some of this. Give your family our condolences. M. W. _

Shuuzou coughs and pushes aside some of the packing material. It’s a fruit and cheese platter, apples and pears and strawberries and several kinds of cheeses. Shit, this is way better than another tooth-rotting set of cookies and cakes.

_ dude. this is great. thank you. _

The text feels inadequate, and Shuuzou feels ridiculous that this is hitting him so hard. 

_ No problem. Should I send another one? _

It’s a feeble attempt at a joke, or maybe even sincere, but the gesture is sweet and thoughtful.

_ill let you know,_ Shuuzou types back.

* * *

Shuuzou’s sister’s lifeguarding gig starts up the next week. She looks put out asking Shuuzou to drive her, and he understands the annoyance of being a kid without a more reliable means of transport than two bus transfers, but he’s also happy to do it. It gives him a reason to leave the house and do something other than work out or spend money, even if that something is lie by the pool and try not to get sunburned. He takes his brother, too (and occasionally his mother); the second day his brother runs into some friends from soccer and they splash around in the shallow end playing Marco Polo and steal each other’s lunches and they’re old enough they don’t need Shuuzou watching them.

The rubber (plastic? polyurethane?) straps of the cheap chaise lounge dig into Shuuzou’s skin. They’ll leave marks, to be replaced with where the car seat digs into his sweaty legs after his swim trunks end when he’s driving home, and whenever he moves it’s as if his skin is a velcro strap forced apart from the disgusting material. It’s not comfortable at all, but with the sun beating down and the mix of shouting and splashing and top forty pop music from ten years ago in the background, Shuuzou finds himself drifting off to sleep.

He dreams, at first, of nothing in particular, snatches of conversations, that he’s floating or that his hands are stuck, his leg is itching. Then he’s in a hockey rink, surrounded by players in practice jerseys; he tries to catch sight of faces but they all turn away from him; he’s slammed from behind and spins; the puck is on someone’s stick and he’s not sure if he’s on that person’s team or the other. A whistle sounds, then another, but the play keeps going; a loud shout cuts through and the rink vanishes.

Shuuzou’s eyes are still shut but he can feel the sunglasses over them, snug against his nose, instead of the helmet visor. The top of his head is bare; his shoulder is sticking to the chaise lounge, and the whistle is coming from one of the lifeguards, not a ref. He feels like he could go back to sleep at any moment, but he knows he’s not about to, not really. The momentary peace has been broken, though it might be the best sleep he’s had since before his dad went into the ICU--how long’s it been? He’s not going to calculate; it hurts too much to count the days.

It hurts more to think how deep their tans are getting. It’s nice to have the time to actually be outside, instead of a summer spent in and out of the hospital, washed out by the fluorescent lights, ferrying their father from appointment to appointment, or staying with him inside and out of the sun, on the porch under an umbrella reading to him while he sleeps. Shuuzou had wished he could just abdicate responsibility and stay in the sun more than once, even the summer before he’d gone to college when he’d been training for hockey the whole time, stuck in a gym or out on the ice. This is not the price he would have agreed to pay; he would have paid a little longer for his father to get better--self-sufficient, and for that to be the reason he can lie here, but there’s no bargaining with fate.

Shuuzou’s eyes water and he clamps them closed tighter. Shit. There’s no bargaining; there’s no use in asking himself what he could have done better, how much more time he could have spent with his father, what things that had seemed important at the time really aren’t now. Training camp was the right choice that one summer, even though it might have been his father’s best since he’d gotten sick. It had helped Shuuzou play well enough in his one year of college to get drafted by the Kings and sign with them, to spend every summer and the parts of the next two seasons when he’d been called up at home with his family, to make enough money that his mother didn’t have to worry about working and his siblings didn’t have to worry about college--even if he’d gotten a two-year or for-year degree from a local school, there’s no way he’d be making this much money. Yes, he’d been traded to Jersey, but it had let him make more money and brought him back to LA at least once a year, and free time during the day to call and check up on his parents. Maybe he should have tried to get traded back--but would he even have gotten a chance on the Kings? They’re a better team; there wouldn’t be room for him to carve out a role and a place on the roster. And Shuuzou’s got his pride, too; it would be worth throwing away but he’s not fond of the idea of diving back into the arms of the team that had cast him off with a couple of draft picks for an aging defenseman.

Shuuzou pushes himself up, wincing at the sound and feeling of the straps popping off his skin. He’s not ready to go swimming andthe deli sandwich that was his lunch seems a long-ago memory and the food court here is not optimal but certainly edible. Shuuzou stretches as he makes his way across the deck. There’s no line, and for a second Shuuzou wonders if it’s open.

A teenager pokes his head out from the back. “Gimme a sec.”

Shuuzou takes the time to look at the relatively unappetizing options before him. The french fries look soggy, but they’re cheap and he can always douse them in ketchup. He pulls out a crumpled five from his wallet and presses it flat against the counter, smoothing out wrinkles until they’re gone. The teenager finally reappears.

“Can I get a fries?” says Shuuzou.

“Sure.”

He should get something caffeinated to drink, too--but he’s got water if his brother hasn’t gotten to it already. Shuuzou pays for the fries and grabs a handful of ketchup packets.

Shuuzou’s brother’s friends, too young to drive and too tired to walk, all pile into the back of the Buick while Shuuzou’s sister dozes off in the passenger’s seat, towel draped around her sunburned shoulders. He drops them off at their houses, one by one, following their self-contradictory directions (left, no right on that street, no, straight) until they get there, one by one. One mother comes up to the car and asks if Shuuzou is his brother’s father, and goddamn.

“I don’t look that old, do I?” he asks.

His brother shrugs, visible in the rearview mirror, and turns toward the window; the comment didn’t land as well as Shuuzou had hoped it would. It’s all still too raw, but apologizing it would only scrape the wound harder. He goes the long way around home, turning up the radio ever so slightly. It’s stuck on the classical station, an aria Shuuzou knows, kind of, half-absorbed through years of his father playing it on record, on CD, downloaded onto his phone and played through the Bluetooth speaker Shuuzou had bought him for his birthday one year, probably lost somewhere in his bedroom or tucked away in a drawer right now. 

Shuuzou spins the dial, tuning into the news channel, traffic everywhere, accidents, storefront robberies, a restaurant fire over in Brentwood. Better than thinking about his father humming along to the music.

* * *

It becomes a routine, getting to the pool as it opens, staying there all day, and driving home, picking up groceries or takeout on the way back. Sometimes Shuuzou’s sister drives, and as the days get shorter she can handle the blazing sunsets and reflected light, rush hour traffic and tight turns. Shuuzou gets a few laps in the pool in every day, working out in the basement or at the real gym on the days his sister has off.

All semblance of Shuuzou’s normal sleep schedule, even a normal in-season sleep schedule, has gone out the window, if it was ever here. His body is still tired from those sleepless nights, catching up as he dozes by the poolside and wakes himself up with an afternoon iced tea, cane sugar sitting undissolved at the bottom of the clear plastic cup, free refill after free refill. By the time his mom and the kids are in bed, Shuuzou’s wide awake, his mind chomping at the bit to shout scenarios at him.

Hey, what if your neck isn’t sore because you fell asleep in a bad position but because you have meningitis? Or neck cancer? What if your headache is from your brain starting to turn on itself? What if you blanking out and forgetting to bring your sister a soda on her break is the beginning of something else? Has anyone else noticed? Could you have noticed, when it was your father? Could you have said something? Would he have gone to the doctor, and would one surgery and some heavy medication have taken care of it? What if you had tried harder, in the hospital, to get him back into a full-time rehab facility? 

Some nights going as hard as he can on the rowing machine in the basement doesn’t do shit, so Shuuzou goes out and runs. The rhythm of his shoes smacking the pavement, the bassline of a song the only thing audible in his shitty headphones, and the sounds of the night, people fighting and snatches of radio, car tires on the blacktop, are enough of a distraction summed up together. Shuuzou’s always been good at spacing out; it’s always when he does his best thinking. It’s not about anything in particular, real estate and the teammates he hasn’t texted in a few weeks and what’s in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow, and he’d better check if they’ve jacked up the rates again at his dry cleaning place in Jersey. 

Shuuzou thinks of his father again on the way back when he passes the Rite Aid where he used to pick up prescriptions, the pharmacy tech who’d always asked after his mother and the collection of stale candy in the snacks aisle. He’d buy his father gum sometimes, and it would break in his shaky hands. Shuuzou tries to breathe, tries to focus on entering the house quietly. He steps out of his sneakers as he shuts the door behind him, feet feeling strangely light, and heads into the kitchen. He’s about to flip up the light switch when he sees his brother sitting at the far side of the table, glass of ice water next to him.

“Hey,” says Shuuzou.

“Hi,” says his brother. “Water?”

“Sure.”

His brother gets up to get a glass, and Shuuzou sits down across the table, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his t-shirt. His brother’s glass is covered in condensation, water running down the edges like a rainy windowpane. He’s been here a while.

“Can’t sleep?” says Shuuzou.

“I was just thirsty.”

He could have been up late playing video games, but he’d be back up before the glass could condense if it was that. And Shuuzou recognizes the reflexive defensiveness in his tone, the same as he used to cloak all his words in. 

“I couldn’t,” says Shuuzou. “It’s why I went out.”

His brother hands him the second glass and he takes a sip; it’s cool in the house but the cold water is still a shock.

“Did it help?”

“Kind of,” Shuuzou says.

His brother looks as if he wants to speak, but he doesn’t. He takes another sip of his own water, sets it down quiet against the table. Shuuzou wipes the sweat off his face again; he is feeling more tired now. And a little hungry. 

“We still have those cookies that woman from Mom’s group therapy sent?”

“What? Oh, yeah, in the cabinet.”

It takes a few seconds for Shuuzou to see them, in the back, stacked precariously on top of two boxes of pasta and a packet of instant ramen. Shuuzou has to stand on his toes to get them down, grabbing the bag by the edge and nearly dropping it.

The cookies are stale, but edible; Shuuzou grabs a second and third after his first bite. His brother sticks with the one he’d grabbed, chewing while staring into space. He’s spilling crumbs on the table, and his eyes are drooping. Shuuzou yawns, a quick shudder, and then he stuffs the other two cookies into his mouth.

“It worked, then? Running?”

Shuuzou takes a second to realize what his brother’s asking. “Oh. Yeah, I guess it did.”

He ruffles his brother’s hair on his way to put the cookies away; his brother doesn’t complain that he’s too old for that. He’s the first one to wish Shuuzou goodnight, turning off into his bedroom on the second floor landing. The door clicks shut behind him, and Shuuzou turns around, to the complete opposite way from the bathroom and then back again. He’s sleepier than he thought he was.

* * *

Shuuzou’s sleeping through the night more often by the end of August, fewer late-night runs and basement workouts, more regular lights-out by ten. It’ll all be wrecked by the time zone shift soon, but it can’t hurt him to have a solid foundation.

That’s why it’s an anomaly when he does find himself awake in the middle of the night, startled and squinting around at the low digits on the clock face, trying to get his bearings. He can’t remember any dreams at all; his next thought is that there’s an intruder. He hears a sound downstairs and sits up, leaning forward on the bed.

“I don’t want you to stay up and wait for me! I never asked you to!”

His sister’s voice rings through the thin walls. So that’s what it is. A lower voice follows (it sounds like their mother’s), and Shuuzou can’t make out the words.

“I am responsible. I work five days a week and do SAT prep on my lunch breaks and I want to have a little fun on Saturday night. My friends all have their licenses; they’re perfectly capable of driving me home!”

Another inaudible reply.

“At least I have a job!”

Her feet stomp on the carpeted stairs, less of an effect than she probably wants. It might be funny if she hadn’t dealt such an unfair blow, but Shuuzou can’t say he didn’t say worse back in the day--having been a few years younger isn’t much of an excuse. Should he try to talk to his mother now? To his sister? He might make it worse; just because they know he heard it doesn’t mean they want to talk about it. His father would know the right thing to say, or he’d stop the argument before it happened; he had known how to calm things between his mother and sister before they started. Or maybe it was just that he was there and he was sick, and neither of them wanted to agitate him or wake him up. Maybe his sister’s saved up years of teenage rebellion. Instead of yelling and getting kicked out of the hospital, fighting and worrying her sick father, she’d let the resentment build up like plaque on teeth.

His mother’s footsteps up to the landing are softer. Shuuzou rolls over, planting his face into the pillow. He’s probably projecting too much, but he doesn’t know how else to relate to the situation, Even if he could conjure up the words his father used, would they mean the same thing coming from him?

* * *

Two weeks to training camp and Shuuzou finds himself looking forward to it instead of missing the summer before it ends. There’s not much to miss from this summer, but even giving up the longer days and freed-up schedule will be worth the trade to get the fuck out of here. It’s like he’s mired in memory, the shell and shed skin of his father’s life clinging to him like fly paper, jogging the route to the hospital on autopilot, passing through a room in the house and being reminded of his father’s footsteps through it, his father sitting in a chair, the stack of his father’s books on the table.

And all of them are afraid to move and kick up the dust, as if that will destroy the memory along with its replica, that without a million life preservers to cling to, what remains of his father will fall below the surface and vanish. It won’t; the rational part of Shuuzou’s brain knows it won’t. But since it’s hard for him to remember now how things were before his father was sick, so who’s to say new memories of new people won’t crowd out all the memories of his father that Shuuzou has left? And even if he remembers, he’d read somewhere that recalling a memory distorts it every time, so how long does he have to remember until the events are unrecognizable? It’s irrational, but what if it isn’t?

Maybe going away will make the memories fade faster, but maybe it’ll be the opposite. Maybe if he doesn’t have his father’s presence surrounding him everywhere, his mind will compensate for it in some other way.

He goes rollerblading, wearing out his old set of wheels on the bumps and roughness of the sidewalk and the streets and the park, and wearing in a new set on an empty asphalt basketball court. He’s brought his stick and a puck, but there’s no one around to play with. He’d never been able to get a good game of street hockey going as a teenager, even; anyone who was really interested had hung out at the roller rink for free skates and leagues. Shuuzou doesn’t resent that; it’s what made him the connections that got him into college and to the pros, and he’d met some good people there. But they’ve all left the scene now; to anyone there he’ll only be a pro, a measuring stick, a target. He’d rather bank the puck off the base of the fense to himself, put the puck over the goal line that only exists in his head, make hairpin turns around invisible opponents. It’s still hockey. Skating with a stick in his hands, winding up and taking a slapper from the blue line like he’s quarterbacking the powerplay, or making a saucer pass to no one clears his head better than anything. It always has, since he was an angry brat who needed an outlet for his aggression. He can’t fucking wait for the season to start.

* * *

Getting into the preseason groove does not come without difficulty. He’s rusty and it shows the first few days with the way the rink rat kids shove him around, but by the fourth day Shuuzou feels back. He nets a goal and an assist in a scrimmage, a couple of hard checks and a block that leaves his thigh stinging and a grin on his face. He hadn’t really consciously missed this, too caught up in the things he’d never get back, but he’d wanted it even if he hadn’t had the room to realize it.

It’s hard to not really have anyone to talk about his father face-to-face, but it’s easy being around people who live outside the wasteland that his father’s death had wrought. More than driving his brother’s friends around, more than interacting through the middleman of social media, it’s like he remembers how to be normal, to be a person in the wider world where not everything is shaped like edifices carved from death’s mountain faces.

He feels older, though, and not just in the way that everything’s changed him, but because the rookies really do seem like kids, even if they’ve been traveling on junior teams since they were ten years younger than Shuuzou is now. Their faces and eyes, the things they say, the excitement and the novelty of being out on their own and going clubbing with their own disposable income--Shuuzou was never exactly like that, but he remembers wanting to be that, understanding the point of view more than he does now.

“Are we fuckin’ old now or what?” Enbar asks as they make their way out of the practice facility.

He looks as wiped as Shuuzou feels. “Unfortunately.”

Enbar laughs. “They’re going out on the town and we’re all going back home.”

“We go out sometimes,” says Walker. 

“Yeah, to supervise,” says Enbar. “Or to go to a nice restaurant.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” says Shuuzou.

There’s a difference, though, between going out with the kids like a reluctant older brother and going out to dance and drink and shit, and to forgo it at all to stay home with the family you’re going to end up spending half the season away from or getting the extra rest you need. That will be Shuuzou someday, provided he hasn’t met some massively awful career-ending injury. He doesn’t want to jinx that, or think too far into the future, but the traffic that stalls his ride home to a crawl doesn’t give him much of a reason to stray from the path his thoughts are going down. A hypothetical husband, kids--maybe not when he’s still playing but somewhere down the line, people he will love but who will never get to meet his father, other people to cook for rather than shrugging his shoulders at another poor attempt at homemade gyoza and ordering takeout, a husband who will make the dough properly and show him and the kids until they all have it. 

It’s not like another year or five would have made it likely (or, with kids, really possible) for them to meet his father and get more of an impression of him. He can always tell them stories, moments, but how many of them will not be about his father being sick (or indirectly so)? Knowing someone through indirect accounts isn’t the same as knowing them as people, the thousands of mannerisms Shuuzou can’t articulate or will have forgotten, the tones of their voice, seeing them across from you, their face changing expressions or reflecting your own. 

To be old is, maybe, having a pile of regrets and missed changes you don’t know what to do with, but so many older people have managed to move past the ones they have. Maybe to be immature is to not see around the trees blocking your way and look back at the diverging paths until you walk forward and smack your head.

“Enough feeling sorry for yourself,” Shuuzou says aloud. “Enough.”

He’s not going to try and disallow himself to want or regret. It would be stupid to try and wipe away the fresh sadness that surfaces less like a geyser now and more like a small fountain, diminishing in frequency but still very much there. But he’s not old; his body’s been thrown around but he can get up and skate and he doesn’t ache everywhere all the time. He gets hangovers and needs more sleep, but he’s healthy and he’s got a job and good insurance, and a house he owns outright. Things aren’t perfect, but dwelling on impossible things he wants is a waste, and so is hating that he does it.

* * *

Shuuzou shifts his skates on the ice, staring at the flags as the national anthem plays. It’s too long, and always somehow longer for the first game of the regular season on top of all the extra ceremonial frills. The extra time gives him too much room to think about everything. Last season his father had watched the game and texted him words of encouragement during the intermission, spelled and punctuated normally, not like when Shuuzou could barely decipher the meaning with context and took it as a sign of another infection or relapse taking hold and would call his mother, waiting for the verdict to drop like a hammer on the other side of the country and hoping they’d make it through this one--and they always had.

His mother’s probably watching this; it’s too early for the kids to be home from school yet, three hours behind, but they’ll get in partway through, but they’ll only send him texts after the game. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t check his phone until after; it’s the thought and the idea that count--and yeah it would be different getting them from someone who isn’t his dad, but that’s not the fucking point. 

The singer holds her high note; Shuuzou stares at the rafters. Three Stanley Cups, high time for another one. They’re not projected to be more than mediocre this year, but no one ever got anywhere by aiming for the middle, and Shuuzou’s not planning on doing that. As the song finishes, he exhales. It starts with the opening faceoff, the first shift, the first piece of momentum up for grabs. Shuuzou skates over to center ice, his skates cutting straight through the fresh ice. 

The Flyers win the faceoff and send it stick to stick and dump it right into the Devils’ zone. Shuuzou gives chase but he’s already out of position and one of the Devils' d-men is closer; Shuuzou skates over to the far side, trying to block away his man. Two of the Flyers reach the puck before anyone on the Devils reaches the circles, and the Flyers control behind the net. Sundstrom, the Devils' goalie, spreads his legs, trying to gauge where the puck is without turning too far to avoid a shot from the other way.

The Flyers are playing like cats with a waterbug, passing the puck like they have a 5-minute five on three. But the Devils are playing like it too, scared and defensive, like trying to stop a stab wound with a piece of toilet paper.

Shuuzou lunges for the puck as it comes his way, and he gets a piece. It’s loose, and he and three other guys all converge on it. One of the Flyers comes away with it in the end, but one of Shuuzou’s teammates is there to poke it out to center ice for enough time to make an overdue line change. Even skating back to the benches for that, Shuuzou feels like they’re all two steps behind the Flyers.

It’s five minutes until they get a real offensive opportunity, gaining the zone two on one. Shuuzou stands up from the bench; maybe the Flyers’ goalie will leave the wrong half of the net empty, or he won’t react in time to a top-shelf shot--and then the shot goes straight into his chest. Shuuzou swears under his breath, and he’s not the only one on the bench who does. 

The puck trickles back out to center ice before the Devils can get set up, and the Flyers’ top draft pick grabs it before anyone else can. He’s small and plays a loose D, but he’s fucking fast. He zips past his teammates; Enbar is the last D back for the Devils and he can’t even hook the kid in time. 

He moves in, dekes left, and Shuuzou holds his breath (a superstition that only seems to work a quarter of the time but he still takes the chance). The shot is quick, but Sundstrom’s glove is quicke, closing around the puck like the jaws of a Venus Flytrap. 

That’s all the momentum the Devils need to grab control of the puck, force the play back over, and finally, finally, score, a rocket from between the circles by one of their own rookies.

It would have been better to end the game right there, seven minutes in. But games are sixty, and the Flyers’ three second-period goals count for real, and the Devils can’t do shit in the third to claw back. Every time they gain the zone or get a few shots off they’re forced back, by a relentless, rust-free Flyers squad. Two steps behind turn to three; they’re all lagging and they’re all tired and they’re definitely going to have to start practice early tomorrow, because they all really fucking need it. It’s not a moral victory or bad luck, or something out of the way; it’s the kind of thing that makes Shuuzou want to grab the nearest guy in orange and fight him.

It’s almost too bad he has impulse control, but it’s too late for a fight to swing the game their way or silence the Flyers and their home crowd--Shuuzou’s services are needed in taking minutes that the kids can’t; he’s a plus-zero and he’s not making really stupid mistakes even if he’s skating behind the play, and they’re in real fucking trouble if that’s their best.

The locker room is silent after the game; what needs to be said? If they were one of those teams that gives out a puck or a hat or something to the best player, none of them would fucking deserve it tonight (maybe Sundstrom, for dealing with the onslaught of shots, but he’d been scrambling and out of position as much as the rest of them). 

When Shuuzou checks his phone, he’s got one message each from his mother, sister, and brother. _Take more shots,_ _nice check at the blueline,_ and _u should have fought that guy who was chirping u_ respectively _._

* * *

October fades into November and the season begins to grind like a coffee mill on a fine setting. The equipment and the rookies aren’t all new; one game doesn’t drastically shift the standings or dig the Devils out of the last-place hole they’re sinking into; the days and weeks settle into a routine. Shuuzou calls his mother only once a week now; he can go a day or two without charging his phone because he’s not texting his parents and siblings or checking for notifications all the time. Even though he’s not feeling great, he’s not feeling the hard spikes of anxiety when his father is hospitalized far away, no waking up in the middle of the night in a  hotel and groping for his phone, positive he’d just heard it vibrate but waking it up, squinting at the brightness, and seeing a tie when he shouldn’t be awake reflected back at him.

He dreams about his father sometimes, still sick, disoriented; he dreams about being half-asleep in the ICU with a stiff back. He dreams about being half-asleep in the step-down unit, medical terms floating around his brain, a game in Anaheim the next day that he’ll be half-asleep for, get slammed into the boards but block a couple of shots, and no one will ask him why his game’s so off, and he wakes up with the familiar anxiety rolling off him, heart pounding. His father’s already dead; there’s nothing to be anxious for, but somehow something seems to be waiting right beyond the bend. 

Shuuzou’s mother usually calls when he’s eating dinner, a while before the kids get home when it’s the middle of the afternoon in LA. Sometimes he’s on the verge of telling her everything that happens in these dreams, but what could she do? It might only stress her out more, and Shuuzou won’t let himself do that to her. He’s done that too much already. 

“How’s the job search?” Shuuzou says.

“There’s a position opening up at the JACCC working with volunteers, and I’ve spoken to the hiring manager about it,” says his mother.

“Is it something you want to to do?”

Shuuzou’s mother pauses. “I like volunteering there, and it’s a step above what I could get somewhere else given my experience.”

A diplomatic answer. Shuuzou purses his lips; it’s not for him to tell his mother what to do with her life. It might not be for him to even ask more invasive questions, like whether she plans on moving back to Japan, right away or after the kids finish high school. He’s been thinking of her as on her own, in a country she never wanted to come to, her whole life here built around his father, but that’s not really true. She’d made time for jobs and volunteering whenever his father had been well enough; she probably has more friends than Shuuzou does. He hadn’t meant to minimize them, but his father’s illness had been like a black hole that they’d all been orbiting, only able to see each other distorted and warped by the puncture in spacetime. 

“Everything else okay?” says Shuuzou.

“Your sister is still acting...difficult.” Her voice is weary, as if she’s worn deep ruts into the path of the phrase.

“Why?” says Shuuzou. “She’s not getting into trouble at school, is she?”

“No, no, her grades are the same and she seems fine socially. My therapist says she’s mad at your father and taking it out on me, but I don’t know if that’s true.”

“She’s sixteen. Even without all of this, lots of kids don’t get along with their parents. It’s a lot harder to act rebellious when you’re up all night in a hospital room,” says Shuuzou.

His mother sighs. “It’s just...we argue about stupid things, and it’s my fault, too—”

“You’re stressed,” says Shuuzou, “Kids are good at provoking. I did that shit all of the time.”

“That was different,” Shuuzou’s mother says.   
“You want me to talk to her? Even if she’s just upset about Dad and stuff, you know…”

“She’ll know I talked to you about her.”

“So?”

“She got mad about me talking about her with your brother the other day.”

“So I definitely need to talk to her. I’ll take her out somewhere or something.”

“Shuuzou…”

“Mom. I got it. West coast road trip is soon, remember?”

She doesn’t protest again.

* * *

The Devils’ flight out to LA from Minnesota is delayed by rain for an hour, so Shuuzou doesn’t actually get home until three in the morning. Someone had left the lights on for him downstairs, the living room and the kitchen, but the foyer is still outlined in light bleeding in from the other rooms and from the porch. He places his bag down against the wall and heads into the kitchen for a glass of water. It’s unoccupied, his brother’s schoolbag sitting on one of the chairs and someone’s glass of water sitting out on the countertop. Shuuzou dumps it and squeezes some soap out onto the ratty sponge by the sink. After washing out the glass, he fills it with cold water and chugs it all in one go. Fucking airplanes, and sleep meds, combining to give him the grossest dry mouth. He fills the glass up again and this time drinks it a little slower.

He fills it up again, but this time holds the glass and walks back to the doorway to turn off the light and head into the living room. It looks big and empty, and it takes Shuuzou a second. The hospital bed is gone from its place next to the couch. The IV pole is nowhere to be seen. He can see the ugly patterns on the chairs; they’re not buried under plastic slipcovers and piles of his father’s sweaters and blankets. They hadn’t been when Shuuzou had left, but he hadn’t been in the living room enough to get used to their absence, and he feels--not betrayed, or disturbed, or upset, but something like that. Like there are seams running up the center of his chest and they’re straining. Their persistent presence had been reminders of how sick his father really was, how near to mobility issues and IV drips and constant shivering with the thermostat turned all the way up, but they’d been reminders of how alive he was, too.

He leaves his water glass on the coffee table and crosses to the other side of the living room, to the little alcove with the family altar. His father’s picture catches him off-guard, young and healthy face, a full head of hair and steady, serious expression. 

Shuuzou kneels. “Hi, Dad. I’m back.”

In all likelihood, his father can’t hear him, but--in case he can, and if he can’t, talking won’t hurt.

“I hope they haven’t been arguing too much lately. And I hope no one’s mad at you. But we all miss you a lot.”

It’s trite, and obvious, a set of thoughts that Shuuzou’s had thousands of times. There’s a difference, though, between thinking things and saying them aloud, even if he won’t hear a response from his father.

“I’m here for a game tomorrow. We’re not doing too well this year, but the season’s still young.”

What else is there to say? There is some slack in the seams on his chest now. He remains kneeling, silent for a few moments more.

* * *

The golf clubs are in the back of the garage, behind the busted grill that they keep forgetting to throw out and the gardening supplies that had come with the house and had remained unused. Shuuzou had taken his father golfing a few times while he was still physically able to, when Shuuzou was still bouncing up and down between Manchester and the Kings. He’d bought his father a set of clubs and left them in the garage, in case his father wanted to use them, but he’d gone back into the hospital right after the last time they’d gone and the clubs had stayed there. Shuuzou’s own clubs are all back in Jersey, but this set will do. They’d been light enough for his father’s physical state at the time, so they should work for his sister. 

They are silent in the car; Shuuzou’s sister is as much a morning person as he is, and Shuuzou’s grateful for the extra time to gather himself and what he wants to say. Saturday morning at the local driving range might not be a prime spot for this, but it’s the best Shuuzou can do in his very limited time in LA on this road trip, and he does want to help. Maybe his mother was right when she’d told him he shouldn’t step in, but he’s going to do it anyway. 

“Mom said you guys are fighting a lot,” Shuuzou says as he pushes the button on the key fob.

The Buick honks; Shuuzou’s sister nods and squares her shoulders. “Did she put you up to this?”

“She told me not to talk to you about it,” says Shuuzou. 

His sister says nothing, and Shuuzou leaves it for the time being. Once they’ve purchased their balls and made their way over, she speaks again. 

“It’s stupid. I get mad at really dumb shit all the time, and when I’m already feeling angry she just keeps pushing me over the edge. And then I get madder at myself for getting mad at her, and I’m already a deadweight and I’m doing the opposite of helping, like--you’re supporting Mom financially and she’s taking care of paying all the medical bills on time and getting her life back together and I’m getting mad that we’re having frozen gyoza for dinner again or about homework or whatever. And I keep screwing up.”

She takes a swing at her golf ball and misses completely, then frowns at it. Shuuzou watches; this time she lines up her shot and manages to hit the golf ball a few yards. 

He’s not going to remind her she’s a kid, or that their brother isn’t doing anything to help either--those are true, but this isn’t about exacting logic when the situation isn’t logical at all--or really, the logic of grief is on a separate, arbitrary plane. 

“I have a job, and I’m making more money than I need. I’m really lucky, especially because Mom does need the money and I can provide that. And it does make me feel like I’m doing something, but I also feel like it’s a weak-ass substitute for being there myself. I can’t help her with day-to-day shit, make her dinner, do the stuff I’d been doing all summer. And she can talk to me or vent to me, and I can let her know I love her, but….”

This isn’t really working. His sister’s shot another golf ball, and another. Shuuzou takes a swing of his own, and the ball flies through the air. Not bad, but he’s done better.

“When you were born, Mom and Dad were both so happy. I’d never seen them that happy. They were always stressed, dealing with me all the time, so I figured they’d given up on me, their mistake of a kid, and replaced me with you, and that they’d do everything right this time and you’d be someone they could love and who would make them proud.”

At this, she raises her eyebrows (at least Shuuzou’s got her attention).

“The point is, Mom loves you. She’s always gonna love you. And she loves me too, but I was a stupid kid and I fucked up a lot. But even when I made her and Dad angry and stressed all the time, stayed out all night and got beat up all the time, she still loved me. And she still loves you, and she’s worried about you, and, like, I’m not just telling you to stop stressing her out because she feels bad, but...it’s going to make you feel bad, too. I still feel bad about fucking up all the time. And this is hard for all of us, but it’s okay to feel mad and upset and useless. It’s okay to be a net negative. Mom’s not expecting you to be perfect, or for you guys to get along perfectly all of the time.”

Shuuzou’s rambling now, but he feels as if he doesn’t keep going he’ll lose the part where his sister is trying to follow him rather than just pay lip service to a well-meaning adult who can’t possibly understand how she feels. He’s projecting harder than a wheezing old slide machine in a college classroom, but he remembers being a teenager and feeling like shit all the time. Even if it’s not exactly the same, it’s got to come from a similar place.

“But I keep making it worse. I keep getting mad, and I keep getting mad, and if I don’t stop myself who else is going to?”

“But is stopping yourself like this working?”

She sighs. 

They hit their golf balls in the relative quiet for a minute or two, the swish and smack of the clubs not in any kind of rhythm, but, Shuuzou thinks, a breather. Or maybe it only is for him. His sister’s voice is thick and choking when she speaks. 

“I just...I wish all of this happened to someone else! Like, why me when I can’t even handle it or grow strong from the experience or whatever shit you’re supposed to do? And I know there are kids who don’t have any parents or barely knew them or whatever, and I should be grateful that I still have Mom, and you guys…”

Shuuzou’s already crying, too. He puts his arms around his sister and lets her wipe her face on his t-shirt. He feels like a child who’s too young for this all the goddamn time; she is, too. Her whole childhood basically was spent in hospitals, but she’s barely old enough to remember the time before that, when it wasn’t a question that their father always spoke in full sentences and remembered the address where they lived. 

“I miss him,” Shuuzou says.

His sister nods, her face still pressed into his shoulder. She really is--would be--taller than their dad now. Had he stood up and noticed? He would have gotten a kick out of it, if he were here. 

They don’t finish their golf balls. Shuuzou’s sister doesn’t talk more, doesn’t elaborate on the other things she’s angry about, but she leans against the passenger window, a little more relaxed.

* * *

The game against the Kings starts out good, strong shifts from all four lines, quick backchecking and heads-up saves from the goalies. The Devils are on a three-game losing streak but they’re not playing defeated; they’re playing like they want a win but they aren’t desperate for it. Shuuzou gets a shot off on his second shift, a sharp wrister through the legs of the d-man but blockered aside by the goalie, and Enbar grabs the rebound. The puck comes back to Shuuzou but he doesn’t have a clear shot; he fakes and it works well enough to get the guy on him to follow the direction, and then Shuuzou passes it to the far circle. 

He’s the last to go off for the line change, but they’re still in the Kings’ zone and the jeers and chants are starting to rain down from the crowd. He hasn’t had an all-offense shift like this since last season maybe; they haven’t scored yet but it’s a matter of time and luck, and though the goalie’s been sharp he hasn’t had to make any insane saves so far.

A minute later they get a bullshit boarding call and Shuuzou’s out on the first PK unit. This could kill the momentum or keep it going; the Kings have been so lackluster that they could go the whole two minutes without getting a shot off, or they could panic and make a mistake and the Devils could go back the other way. Shuuzou’s not going to imagine too far down the line in any direction; this could be the tip in their direction the Kings need.

The Devils win the faceoff and the puck comes right to Shuuzou. He sends it down the other way and gives chase; none of his teammates are near enough but none of the Kings are, either. Their goalie comes out to play the puck near the circles, and Shuuzou speeds up. The goalie passes the puck back to one of his teammates, and Shuuzou’s headed the other way again, until the Kings’ forward passes the puck back and it caroms off the intended recipient’s stick and into no man’s land in the neutral zone. 

One of Shuuzou’s teammates picks it up, spinning around to avoid the two Kings trying for it, and banks the puck off the boards and back to himself. He’s free enough to send a pass to Shuuzou, and he brings it back into the zone, toward the net. There’s no one to pass it to, but he has a decent angle, and he aims straight for the area above the goalie’s left shoulder. He gets the shot off just as someone crashes into him, and the puck smacks straight into the crossbar.

Shuuzou swears loudly and turns around to shoulder aside whoever had hit him. The goalie covers the rebound, and Shuuzou heads to the bench for a line change.

The Devils lose the next faceoff, and they’re behind on the play as it heads the other way. The Kings don’t slow down; they’re not focused on setting up the play. (Why should they be?) Three of them, and one Devils’ defenseman between them and Sundstrom, means no contest. The question that remains is where the shot will come from, blocker side or glove side or straight on. It’s glove side, but Shuuzou only registers that as the puck goes in, right above Sundstrom’s shoulder. Fuck. 

That’s the shift in momentum that gets the Kings going; it sets off a chain reaction that reminds them how to play aggressive defense and more aggressive offense, and Shuuzou keeps finding himself pinned back deep in the zone. They escape the period only down by the one goal, but Shuuzou already feels gassed.

The Devils lose 3-0, a score that doesn’t seem as lopsided as the game actually was, and all the momentum they’d had in the first five minutes seems like a mistaken memory by the end of the game. None of the beat writers approach Shuuzou; the Kings dumping him in the Devils’ lap is a tired topic by now and he hadn’t had a noteworthy game--two shots, a bunch of hits, and a hell of a lot of PK time, that maybe would have been of interest the same time Shuuzou facing his old team had been.

* * *

Letting go of the hope that his father is behind every door, at the other end of every phone call or text message, is awfully difficult when Shuuzou hadn’t even had time to let go of the idea of his father getting better, or living longer, or getting the kind of death he’d wanted. It’s stupid. Shuuzou saw him die; he’d held that box of ashes in his hands. His father is gone, but his brain won’t accept that he’s ceased to exist. It’s basic object permanence, taken to a logical extreme. His father had never gotten to see his house in Jersey, the life Shuuzou’s built for himself here; he’d never been out to a Devils game. Shuuzou still pictures him here, in the other chair in the living room, getting a look at the locker room like he had at the Kings’ when Shuuzou had taken him around for a tour. 

Letting go means change, and change means letting go. There’s no way to keep things preserved so that in the impossible circumstance of his father reappearing, that he’d be able to seamlessly integrate back into life. There are better things to prepare for, inevitable things, like his siblings going to college or his own eventual physical decline and retirement. The money’s coming in now, but it won’t forever, and he could somehow get 100 points and a Hart trophy and a bunch of endorsements and then get his head slammed into the boards on opening night the next season and never play a game of professional hockey again. That’s a hell of a lot more likely than his father reappearing, anyway.

So many things serve to remind him that his father’s no longer there. He sees a book on whiskey at the bookstore and can’t text his father a picture; he can’t get a response that the brand on the cover is overrated. His father’s favorite TV shows are going on without him, and though he probably didn’t regret never getting to see these episodes, Shuuzou can’t talk to him about them, and watching them by himself feels almost pointless. 

He won’t lose what his father meant (and still means) to him when he lets go. Shuuzou knows this. It won’t suddenly make him okay with the fact that his father never got to see so much of his and his siblings’ lives (that his siblings never really got to know their father as someone who wasn’t so sick), and it won’t make him think that his father getting sick at all was fair. It won’t reward him by sticking him in another universe where his father never got sick, or never got that sick, a universe that would seem too alien to live in.

Shuuzou’s never been a crier, but some days he finds himself bracing his shoulders at the kitchen table in pain, tears streaming down his face as if from open IV lines. There has never been anything he can do for this, outside of peripheral things like driving his dad to treatment and paying for expenses. He can’t punch cancer in the face; he can’t speed up the pace of medical research. He’s never felt this powerless and insignificant and alone, though, as if the world could rend itself to shreds and leave him in solitude. As if it will. He can’t talk to anyone about it; he doesn’t want to bring it up with his mother and siblings all the time, and he doesn’t want to drag his teammates into holding him a pity party. Walker knows, and he’d told Enbar, and Shuuzou knows he’s not the only one on the team who’s lost a parent. But how can he say anything? He’s not going to be that guy who brings up his own personal tragedy all the damn time, and he doesn’t know what about it to say. 

He stays home a lot, finally learning the intricacies of the propane grill he’d bought last fall on clearance and barely used. It’s good for steaks, better for vegetables and seafood, and really great for pinwheel sausages. Those apparently get the seal of approval from his neighbor’s kitten--cat, now, she’s gotten so big--because whenever he grills them she comes over looking for a handout. Shuuzou will give her a piece sometimes, and only feel a little guilty (these sausages don’t have too many weird preservatives in them). She’s good company, doesn’t talk back and only wants food and scratches behind her ears in return for her listening. And when he talks to her, he doesn’t have to give her all the context or information. 

“How can I stop feeling so bad about it? Even if it is my fault he got sick, feeling like shit won’t make up for it.”

The cat purrs, stretching her neck to give Shuuzou access to her cheeks and chin.

“Good girl,” Shuuzou murmurs, scratching under her chin. 

Her eyes are closed in contentment. Being a cat must be nice, running after wildlife and rolling in the dirt, going home to a house where someone else pays the bills and owns the deed, lying in the sunlight and not having to worry over the consequences of things you did ten or fifteen years ago. 

Shuuzou just wants to sleep, take the short days as they come, and do nothing. He wants to want to do more, but it all feels like a chore. Even when he enjoys practices or games, the prospect of going out and doing it again seems daunting, like it’ll be more effort than it’s worth (and he doesn’t always enjoy them, even setting apart all the losses and terrible team efforts they’ve had so far this season). He’d read an article online about grief, about how some cultures expect you to take a year off after a loved one dies. Shuuzou’s not sure he wants that, either, though. Complete withdrawal would leave him to stew in his feelings and tread water where he is. 

His conscience says his friends will stop inviting him out if he keeps refusing, and it says that he should fake it until he makes it, but Shuuzou’s tired of faking. Just because he’s not going to be that mopey guy doesn’t mean he wants to put on more of a mask, pretend that his life is fine and that he feels great and that he agrees it would be fun to flirt with pretty women across the bar and that he is exactly who people expect him to be. Sometimes he doesn’t know what that is but tries anyway, but he’s long since made up any debt incurred by rebelling for rebellion’s sake so long ago.

He’s an adult, with a house he owns outright, a car with low insurance rates, and he doesn’t have to pretend. Even if he’s not shouting, “Hey! My dad died and I feel fucking awful! And I’m gay and lonely!” he doesn’t have to overcorrect. His teammates aren’t going to pry too much. He trusts them to have his back in a fight; he can trust them with more of himself. 

Going golfing or to a bar or a movie won’t fill the time he’s used to spending on his father, sending him texts and emails, worrying whether the medicine is working, whether he’s showing symptoms no one’s picking up on. Shuuzou doesn’t want to worry, but worrying would mean his father was still there, a radio wave away.

* * *

The people in charge of the arena music have begun to recycle the songs they’d used in the first period at the end of the third. They’ve had a lot of breaks in the action, and there are only so many New Year’s and fireworks-related songs, but Shuuzou doubts they were handed a mandate not to play anything from the standard classic rock playlist today.

“Same songs again, eh?” says Enbar.

“No imagination,” says Shuuzou.

They line up for the faceoff, another one in their zone; if they can only fucking clear it and pull the goalie they’ll have a shot at going into OT. Shuuzou shifts on his skates, waiting for the puck drop, and then it comes. The Caps win the draw and pass it towards the net, but Shuuzou’s in the right place to make a solid hit and the puck slips into the corner where Walker picks it up, carrying it around the other side of the net and passing it up the net. The Devils break out, into the neutral zone, toward center ice, and over the line. Shuuzou skates off for a change; the goalie’s already on the bench for the extra skater, and Shuuzou waits.

Something good could happen; they could do it, send the fans home happy, give them an OT game and then an OT win. Forty seconds left, Shuuzou chews his mouth guard. They’re getting the shot set up, patient but the slow pace is agony. Quantity, i.e. one or more shots, matters more than getting the perfect one. Thirty seconds, they shoot and a Capitals defenseman kneels to block it. The puck comes back to Walker; he passes it back. They hold the puck, twenty seconds. Fifteen. Fuck.

Another shot, this one through the crease, into the corner as the bodies converge on top of it. Ten seconds, they’re not going to make it unless someone scores on a miracle wraparound--the puck trickles out, and two Devils are on it, and then the horn sounds. Fuck. What a way to end this garbage year, a loss they should have had.

Last year, Shuuzou had taken pictures of the fireworks and sent them to his parents; this year, the fireworks make him think of that night back in July, when everything had seemed like it could turn out okay, that his father could get radiation and rehab and whatever else he needed, that he could come home from the hospital and walk into the living room before seating himself in the chair. Things hadn’t looked great back then, but they’d been a hell of a lot better than having what remains of his father stuck to his memory, woven in silky spiderweb strands, and packed tightly in a box that will be buried in a country his father hasn’t returned to in ten years.

The walk through the parking lot back to his car seems longer and colder than usual. Shuuzou can see his breath, but there’s only light rain coming down, no snow or hail. 

“Hey, Niji!” Walker calls. “You coming out with us?”

Shuuzou shakes his head. “I got other plans, sorry.”

“Text if you finish early? We’ll be somewhere downtown.”

“Will do,” says Shuuzou.

He’s got no plans other than staying inside, maybe watching a movie or catching up on TV. This year ending is something to celebrate, but Shuuzou isn’t sure he feels like socializing, or presenting himself to the world. The nights are long this deep in winter, and when he pulls into the driveway and gets out of the car, the feeling of not having to be anywhere or answer to anyone is night.

There’s cheap whiskey in the cabinet and ice in the freezer and several things queued up on Netflix, but it doesn’t seem all that appealing when Shuuzou sits down to start. His phone vibrates again. He should block notifications from the group text, at least just for tonight--or he could go out and join them, button his shirt up all the way and call a cab and be downtown in twenty minutes, walk through the cigarette-and-marijuana-smoke haze by the bars, drink and play pool and shout at flat screen televisions with his friends, ring in the new year by doing anything better than feeling sorry for himself.

Shuuzou grabs the remote and turns off the TV, and then picks up his phone, scrolling through the group message thread until he finds the name of the bar.

* * *

Somehow, Shuuzou gets roped into chaperoning some of the kids into the city to go clubbing in the middle of January. It’s part process of elimination (he has no young kids or needy pets at home, won’t be too permissive or too much of a killjoy) and probably part Walker and Enbar shoving him to do something other than spend a night at home. (For all they know, he could have someone new in his bed every night and a vibrant blogging life, but, well, he doesn’t.)

Shuuzou would never go to this kind of dance club on his own, but he’s been dragged to plenty of them (one in particular up in New Hampshire that he’d been to both in college and down in the A whose doors he would prefer to remain as far away from as humanly possible). Shitty bass lines, twelve dollars for a tiny well drink, and enough bodies that it’s impossible to have any personal space when you’re actively trying, are not his favorite combination, but he won’t judge. 

There are some cute guys in tight outfits at least; they give Shuuzou something to look at so he doesn’t down his drink in one go. The plastic cup is cheap as shit but the drink is sweet enough to mask the burn of the cheap liquor. He leans against the bar; most of the kids have scattered to find dance floor space or girls or people to try and impress with their presence. Murphy and Vampola are still waiting for drinks, and Shuuzou’s about to lean over and talk to them when a bartender slides four Heinekens across the bar toward them.

“Double-fisting?” says Shuuzou.

(He’s pretty sure they’d been pregaming before he’d met up with them at the train station.)

“This shit’s weak, Niji,” says Vampola.

“Yeah, you can’t get, like, blasted,” says Murphy. 

Spoken like someone who’s way too overconfident. The two of them head off into the crowd and Shuuzou sighs. He can see most of the dance floor from here, and if he squints and picks through the crowd he can see all five of them; Murphy and Vampola chugging their beers, Petrov chatting up a woman in a pink dress, Liberto and Chalandon dancing mostly on the beat. Shuuzou takes another sip of his drink, and then pulls out his phone to check the time. He’s got a couple of new texts on one of the team group chains that’s mostly older guys.

_ I wonder how Niji’s babysitting is going. _

_ great _ , he texts back.  _ i think theyre having fun. _

_ Are you? _

He texts back a picture of his half-finished whiskey and Coke, and then closes messages to check the weather. The chance of rain’s gone down tonight, good. He opens up Grindr to flip through it, lots of guys in his immediate vicinity but he doesn’t really feel like making small talk over a screen or sending a picture of his cock taken in the dirty nightclub bathroom. He orders another drink; it’ll make the music seem less annoying and more like a fuzzy background. 

A woman across the bar leans forward and pouts her lips at him. Shuuzou pretends not to see, glancing down at his phone screen again. 

“Hey!” Petrov is back, arms crossed at Shuuzou.

“Yes?”

“You should be having fun, too! Come dance!”

He ignores Shuuzou’s protests that sitting at the bar is fun and leads him through the crowd, closer to the DJ booth. The music grows louder; Shuuzou can feel it in his teeth. Petrov begins shouting along to the lyrics. Shuuzou can’t tell if they’re the right words or not, but he supposes it doesn’t really matter. He downs most of the rest of his drink and bounces along to the music. He’s no dancer, but he’s here so he might as well try.

They make it through what seems like three more songs (it’s hard to tell when they fade in and out of each other and go on so long, but Shuuzou thinks there were a couple of distinctive breaks that weren’t part of one overarching thing) until Shuuzou’s phone buzzes in his pocket with a text from Chalandon.

_ where r u?? come 2 the bar?? _

He weaves out through the sweat-drenched crowd and back to the bar where Chalandon waits, lips pressed together.

“Murphy’s in the bathroom; I think he’s really sick.”

Shit. Shuuzou carves his way through the crowd over to the men’s room near the back, pushing open the door.

“Farthest stall,” says Chalandon. 

Shuuzou knocks on the dented aluminum door, and it swings open. Murphy leans against the wall, chest heaving. He’s not kneeling on the floor, passed out, or currently puking his guts out, so Shuuzou counts that as a plus

“Ok there, bud?”

Murphy nods. “I think so.”

Shuuzou’s not going to tell him he doesn’t look it. The empty cup in his hands will do; he hands it to Chalandon. 

“Rinse this out and fill it up with water for him.”

The bathroom door flies open; a bunch of hairy guys with glowsticks around their necks squeeze through the door. 

“Can you get out of the stall?”

Murphy nods again, and stands up straight. He looks like he’s about to be sick again, but he manages to stand steady on his feet and take Shuuzou’s hand. His is cold and sweaty.

Chalandon hands Shuuzou the cup, and he holds it up to Murphy’s lips. Murphy sucks it down, and Shuuzou heads over to the sink to refill the cup for him.

“Is everything good?” says Chalandon, probably looking to be dismissed.

“Get us a cab, and round up the others.”

By the time he gets Murphy out of the bathroom, Chalandon has assembled Petrov, Liberto, Vampola, and a girl hanging off of Vampola’s arm.

“We’re going back to her place,” says Vampola. 

She looks legit enough, definitely as into Vampola as he is into her. Shuuzou shrugs.

“Have fun.”

Murphy falls asleep in the cab when they’re halfway through the Lincoln Tunnel. Shuuzou fires off a text to the group (though most of them probably won’t read it until a more reasonable hour).

* * *

Five straight losses and the win on their first game of the calendar year seems more like an aberration and less like starting the year by righting the ship. The Senators are no better than the Devils on paper, but they take both sides of the home-and-home easily, miring the Devils deeper in last place.

There are many worse things than losing a game, or losing every game (although the Devils aren’t quite that bad). Losing casts a shadow over the team, though, a constant dark-grey mass of clouds that threatens thunder in the locker room, lightning on the team plane, a downpour at practices. Some guys have made no secret of their frustrations, some their desire to be anywhere else, and the coaching staff cowers like they’re all going to be axed every time the Devils give up a goal. Shuuzou’s still trying. He’s not the only one, but after games like this it seems like there aren’t enough of them to matter.

It’s this shitty attitude that gets Shuuzou’s fuse lit easier, the line to explosion cut shorter. Their next game in Montreal, he gets shoved in front of the net and shoves back harder. He knows he’s being goaded; he knows it shouldn’t work, it’s a technique that hasn’t worked on him in forever but he crumbles, and instead of waiting for a whistle or concentrating on the puck he turns around and drops his gloves.

Broussard, the guy who’d shoved him, is a fucking pest, and he’s grinning like the fight doesn’t matter. It doesn’t, and Shuuzou can’t pretend it does.

“You wanna fucking go?”

“Yeah, I wanna fucking go, asshole,” says Shuuzou.

Broussard drops the gloves, and they circle. Shuuzou grabs the front of Broussard’s jersey and yanks, rearing back to try and throw a punch. Broussard grapples, trying to hold him off, but Shuuzou swings, connecting with Broussard’s cheek, his knuckles grazing the strap of Broussard’s helmet. He’s distracted for a second by the sting, and misses Broussard punching him back, hard in the jaw. The pain is instantaneous, and Shuuzou wobbles but stays up. He hadn’t heard anything crack, but that doesn’t mean shit; it could be fractured and he could be out for the year and it’s his own fucking fault, so he’d better make the most of his last few seconds out on the ice.

His ears are ringing; Broussard is jawing at him still and the refs look ready to step in, so Shuuzou throws another punch, his whole body behind it, and Broussard goes down to the ice, bringing Shuuzou down on top of him. The refs pull him off, and Shuuzou gets up; he feels slightly sick. 

“You okay, Niji?”

He can’t tell who’s asking, and opening his mouth fucking hurts. Shuuzou points to the spot on his jaw, and his teammate seems to get the message, taking his arm and skating him over to the bench. Shuuzou heads down the tunnel toward the locker room and the training staff.

His jaw isn’t broken, just bruised and swollen; he’s going to miss the rest of the game but he’ll probably avoid IR. It seems like a light sentence for a stupid mistake that he’d regretted before he even made it. Shuuzou clenches his fist and then relaxes it, then opens his hand. How could he be so stupid after having controlled his temper so well all year?

He watches the rest of the game on the locker room television, another bad effort and another loss. He can only look at the circled date on his phone calendar with his flight back home to LA for the all-star break so many times. It can’t come soon enough.

* * *

With the tri-state area in the clutches of a polar vortex, Shuuzou’s lucky that his car starts in the morning. Stopping for breakfast could be pushing his luck, but the engine’s warm by now and it’s only a quick hop in and out of the WaWa for food and a cup of coffee that’s enough to take his hands from cold-numb all the way to hot-numb. His phone starts chirping halfway between there and the arena; that can’t be good. Shuuzou’s immediate thought is that he’s been traded; the next is--no, people would be calling if it were that. Once he pulls into his parking spot; he leaves the heater on and opens up his messages.

It’s all in one thread; the Devils have made a huge three-team trade, Sundstrom and Diaz and a late draft pick for a second-round pick from each team and a young defensive defenseman. Not bad from a long-term point of view, but it means the front office has officially given up on this season. It also means that two more guys who have been here way longer than Shuuzou has are leaving, that the franchise is turning over on top of him. He’d just signed an extension; it’s not likely that they’ll trade him, but Shuuzou knows he’s not a top tier player. The organization isn’t counting on his blossoming into a superstar.

He cuts the engine and gathers up his second egg sandwich and half-finished coffee. The earlier he gets in, the better chance he has of seeing both Sundstrom and Diaz before they leave (if they’re even at practice). After slamming the car door and locking it, Shuuzou heads inside, nodding at the security guard and taking another sip of coffee. He’s about to head into the locker room when one of the trainers waves at him.

“Nijimura! Coach wants to see you.”

Shit. They might be telling him he’s been traded, too, or that they have a deal on the radar, that they’re holding him out tonight so he can flight off to Dallas or wherever in the middle of the game. It’s better to get the whole thing over with, so Shuuzou heads to the coach's office.

"You wanted to see me?"

The coach smiles at him, and Shuuzou takes it as a good sign. He sits down in the chair opposite the desk.

"Nijimura. You've heard about the trade?"

"Yeah."

"So you know we have a vacant alternate captaincy.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to wear the A. You've got a real good work ethic, and you’ve improved in leaps and bounds since you came here. I think you’re ready for the responsibility.”

Shuuzou nods. “Thank you.”

“No need. Just don’t fuck it up.”

Shuuzou grins. “Don’t worry about it, Coach.”

Shuuzou hasn’t had too many thoughts this year of being sent back down to the minors again, but this is like letting the ink dry on the page, setting the moment like a tattoo on skin. If he’s good enough to wear the A, he’s good enough that a rough game or two won’t make or break him, even if the Devils start going through a stretch of playing better than they should. The Kings’ management can suck it for giving up on him.

* * *

It’s too cold and icy to go rollerblading, but warm enough to run with the right sneakers and a lot of layers. Shuuzou’s mother had told him once that his father used to go out running in the early mornings, and asked if he remembered. Shuuzou doesn’t, and knowing that it happened doesn’t dredge up any lost memories or bridge together any associations. There’s no image in Shuuzou’s head of his father in running shorts and a headband, the sound of the shower running at dawn.

They had never talked about early-morning runs, or running at all, when his father was a live, another thing that hadn’t seemed particularly important at the time but that Shuuzou now wishes he had. Something to remember, something to draw on, something to tie them back together. No matter; it’s good exercise, and the wind in his face is almost peaceful, numbing his skin like high-dose novocaine.

Processing emotions is easier when Shuuzou’s feet are in a rhythm on the salty sidewalk than when he’s tossing and turning in bed or pedaling furiously on the stationary bike in the practice facility, even when he’s pushing himself to keep up with his teammates. He still thinks of his father a lot, but it’s sometimes easier and sometimes harder, uneven like a paved road split and crumbling after an icy winter. He knows what to look for sometimes, but occasionally gets caught off guard and trips, stumbling forward (though he usually doesn’t fall and scrape up his hands). 

His father’s death is not the thing that defines him; his father’s sickness itself was never that. It has pushed and pulled at his course until it’s impossible to see behind him in the fog and twists and turns what things would be like if his father was healthy, but there are too many other winds and waves that pushed him just as much along the way. One day, Shuuzou will think about this less than he does now; one day, he will think about his father less. He will be used to the absence, and the changed shape of his life. 

Some people say that something like this has given their lives new meaning, new direction, new resolution.  It has changed Shuuzou, but has given him none of that. His purpose is the same as it ever was, to keep going and pushing, keep supporting himself and his family, keep getting better and win (maybe not the playoffs this year, but a few more games, a good showing in the worlds if he gets invited). He would like more, in the abstract, to be something that would make his father proud, but Shuuzou knows that he would at least not be disappointed. After all, he’d always said it was fine to take the scenic route.

* * *

Shuuzou always forgets the way late winter in Los Angeles feels, so different from the slush and road salt back in Newark, with its short grey days and bare, frozen trees, the same all over the northeast and upper midwest. The last game before the break had been in Calgary, bitter cold and somber, punctuated by another loss. This time they made it to OT, hanging for 63 minutes with the best team in the Western Conference, and though Shuuzou considers moral victories highly overrated, he’ll take this against the alternative of being slaughtered.

It’s easier not to dwell when he wakes up to sunlight and a warm breeze coming in the open window, only one blanket on the bed. Not great ice hockey weather, but a hell of a welcome change. He could roll over and fall back asleep, but the weather’s too damn nice not to go out in, if only to take a walk, and getting out of bed and heading downstairs is easier when the cold doesn’t make him want to wrap his blankets tighter around his body.

His sister sits at the kitchen table with a test-prep book open in front of her, glancing from the page to the notebook beside her.

“Hey,” says Shuuzou. “How’s it going?”

She shrugs. “Are the SATs as bad as the prepping?”

“Well,” says Shuuzou.

He can’t really remember that far back, or at least about that stuff. It had seemed important at the time, even though he knew he’d just have to get a decent enough score to not be a recruiting liability at the worst of the schools that had shown interest in him. (It was, however, still a minimum that he was coming at with shaky English and little patience for algebra.)

“It’ll all be over in a few hours, even if you have to take it a couple of times,” says Shuuzou. “The waiting for your score’s worse.”

His sister wrinkles her nose.

“Don’t listen to me,” says Shuuzou. “They’ve probably changed the test fifty times since I took it. Maybe there’s some AI that grades your essay.”

“I’m not doing the essay,” says his sister. “A lot of colleges don’t require it.”

“See? When I was a kid—”

She waves her hand, rolling her eyes. 

“How are you and Mom getting along?”

At this, she shrugs. “I mean...I’m trying to hold my temper. I’m doing the dishes more often, I guess.”

Shuuzou ruffles her hair and heads over to the coffee machine. It’s still on from earlier. 

“Thanks,” she says.

“Anytime,” Shuuzou replies.

* * *

The break is almost over before Shuuzou can settle in. It feels strange to be alone in the house, to not have to wait for his parents to come back from an appointment or to be needed at the hospital, to not have to ferry the kids around to school and extracurriculars. He gets to drive his brother to one soccer game and watch him play, but some of his teammates have their licenses already and they drive him to the practices. His sister goes to the library or the local coffee shop, and his mom has work and volunteering, and then the kids go back to school on Monday. 

Shuuzou has to leave before the end of the school day, but his mother’s home. Spending time alone with her seems weird, too; it’s not like talking the phone, texting, emailing, a shared virtual space that they know how to fill. They’ve barely been alone together since before Shuuzou’s sister was born, always with one of the kids or (mostly) his father. 

“Does it get better?” Shuuzou says. 

His mother considers the question, and Shuuzou wonders if he should clarify--his mother’s no farther along in this particular grief than he is, after all.

“I still miss my parents,” she says. “I wish you could have gotten to know them--they would have loved all of you. There’s a lot I wish I could talk to them about, and even though I still do sometimes, it’s so different from when they were there.”

“What about the stuff you forget?”

“There’s a lot of stuff you remember, too,” says his mother. “Even when you’re trying to think about it sometimes you don’t, but you’ll see something or go somewhere and remember something about them you’d thought you’d forgotten. I guess a lot of memories are that way, but…”

She trails off. Shuuzou stares at the table, the scratches and scrapes in the finish.

“I know you don’t need my permission, but it’s okay to think about your father a lot, and it’s okay if you want to talk about him, or if you don’t.”

Shuuzou smiles. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I wonder if I made the right choices sometimes,” she says, staring past Shuuzou at the tiled kitchen wall. “If that’s what he would have wanted. If I just made him suffer.”

He swallows. “He would have wanted that. Dad wanted the best chance to get better. He was always the one who wanted experimental treatments and cutting-edge stuff if it gave him a fight chance. He would have wanted to try, you know?”

“But he was always in denial...I think we all were.”

“It worked, though, doing some of the stuff I didn’t think he should do. You never know what’s going to happen, and we gave him the best shot we could have. Dr. Nagy thought there was a good enough chance for him to do actual rehab, you know?”

“I know,” his mother says, her voice catching. ‘But he was in pain...even before we took him into the hospital, he wouldn’t say.”

“I know,” says Shuuzou. “It’s all hindsight, though.”

He reaches across the table to squeeze his mother’s hand, small and soft and healthy.

“He was so proud of all of you,” Shuuzou’s mother says. “You know, when we first came over here, he bragged to all the nurses about how quickly your siblings were learning English, and how you’d come over soon and how much you helped around the house.”

“That was an exaggeration,” says Shuuzou. “And I still felt bad about all that other stuff.”

“But you still did it,” says his mother. “You’ve all had to deal with so much in the last ten years, and we’ve had so much to be proud of under any circumstances.”

Fuck. Tears prick the back of Shuuzou’s eyes and through to the front; his mother passes him the tissues. 

“I keep forgetting,” says his mother.

She gets up and goes over to the liquor cabinet, rummaging inside it for a second before producing a mostly-full bottle of whiskey. It was his father’s fiftieth birthday gift, Yamazaki single malt purchased from a specialty store. He couldn’t finish a full glass because of the treatment; Shuuzou had had some of his own but they’d saved the rest of it for the (even then) seemingly out-of-reach time when his father would be better enough to drink it. 

“You should take this back with you. Your father would have wanted you to enjoy it.”

He’d have wanted to enjoy it himself. But his mother’s right.

“Thank you.”

The checked baggage fee will be worth this.

* * *

Shuuzou sets his jaw, staring out the window at the city coming into view below him. It’s still illuminated by windows and signs and headlights for another few hours until the daylight comes, but now it’s easier to see the patterns of lights as the avenues crossing each other and straightening out, then twisting again. He forces his eyes closed as the plane tips downward; he doesn’t want to spend the morning in an airport bathroom puking. LaGuardia is always a mistake, the plane dipping down over the water and then two feet later landing on the solid runway, the sound of rushing oceans from his imagination filling up his ears in anticipation. Feeling like they’re going to land on the highway in Newark isn’t great, but it’s better than squeezing his eyes shut and thinking about drowning, clutching the armrest and digging his fingers into his thigh so his nails dent his skin through his clothes and trying to focus on the mundane irritation of the three Benadryls he’d taken early in the flight wearing off. It’ll all be over soon though, no matter what happens, if they burst into 

Shuuzou jerks forward as the plane touches down; his eyes fly open and there is only a light-lined belt of asphalt beside him, no flaming engine on the wing in front, no plane parts hanging by a thread. 

LaGuardia looks especially sleazy in the early morning when nothing’s open yet and the people spilling off the redeyes are the only occupants, funnelling down the hallways and escalators and fighting for cabs. Shuuzou could have flown into Newark, but LaGuardia was cheaper and more convenient timewise, and a cross-country flight would suck as much if it picked him up at his mom’s front door and dropped him off at his own. 

He doesn’t wait too long for a bus. The bumpy, twisting ride through Queens is a distraction from his still-racing heart and the thoughts of danger that cling. He’s statistically more likely to be in an accident going across the Triboro in a bus than he is on a plane, and that fact is more agitating than helpful right now. It’s better to think these thoughts and then count the cars out the window than it would be if he were in a cab and halfway home, when he’d arrive too soon and be unable to fall asleep. He gets off a stop early, pulling his coat tighter around him. The air is crisp and cold, and the suitcase isn’t too heavy on his shoulder as he makes his way to the subway station.

The 2 arrives only five minutes after he gets down (it is still a weekday) but Shuuzou still gets a seat, and one to spare for his bag for a few stops. He’s feeling calmer now, looser, watching people get on and off the train, panhandlers wandering through the cars. 

He gets off at 34th, stopping at Shake Shack for a burger and fries, and then at the newsstand for a copy of the Daily News to read while he waits for the commuter train to Newark. The front page is the New York mayor sticking his foot in his mouth again (fucking typical), and the back page is all basketball. NCAA blurbs are on the top and the bottom, and the main picture is the Knicks’ number 21 pumping his fist. Shuuzou flips through the sports section, nothing about hockey.

People hurry past him; Shuuzou glances up. A train’s currently being announced; he listens for the name of the stops.

“--Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, Metropark—”

That’s his, then. Shuuzou looks up at the board for the track number, though he supposes he could have followed the crowd. He picks a seat on the lower level and places his suitcase next to him.

The sun is rising as the train exits the tunnel and meets the open Jersey air. The familiar yellow-brown reeds and grass of the bogs, the same color as perpetual autumn, are punctuated by patches of snow and the glassy puddles of water and bisected by the roads and the train tracks. Shuuzou flips through the newspaper again, scanning for a mention of the Devils or hockey at all. Nothing, other than the schedules and the standings, not even a preview of an upcoming game, though he’s always heard it’s better not to read your own press.

Shuuzou rolls the paper up and shoves it under his arm as they near the Harrison station, only a minute or so away from Newark, and crams the rest of his burger into his mouth. He needs to buy groceries and refill his barren fridge, figure out what time he needs to get up and head to practice tomorrow afternoon, but that will all come later. Right now, he just needs to get home and take a nap. He’ll be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> I usually don’t like to make Shuu’s father’s illness explicit (in case Fujimaki ever does), but it’s gliosarcoma here. The median survival is between 1 and 2 years, but there are rare cases of people living with the disease for a decade or longer.
> 
> I simplified and minimized some medical details in the interests of the narrative, so if you spot any glaring inaccuracies/impossibilities please let me know. Though I drew from my own prior knowledge/experience for this fic, these accounts of neurological illness and injury provided valuable perspectives and are worth checking out on their own ([1](https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/stacy-title-director-walking-time-bomb.html)) ([2](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/24/ady-barkan-activist-als-226105)) ([3](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/magazine/symptoms-multiple-sclerosis-diagnosis.html)) ([4](https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-night-the-lights-went-out-1834298070)) ([5](https://www.shortlist.com/news/gary-lightbody-snow-patrol-son-dad-dementia)).
> 
> This was difficult to write but I needed to write it. Thank you for reading.


End file.
